


A Gift of Fire

by Moonraykir



Series: Leaf and Stone [2]
Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Battle of Five Armies Fix-It, Courtship, Drama, Dwarf Courting, Dwarf Culture & Customs, Dwarf/Elf Relationship(s), Elf Culture & Customs, F/M, Fluff, Kíli as King, Romance, Romantic Fluff, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-03 03:46:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 24
Words: 53,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5275292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moonraykir/pseuds/Moonraykir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Desperate to save a dying Kili, Tauriel expends the flame of her spirit to lend him strength. Will it be enough to save him a second time? And can she keep her half of the promise she made by accepting his runestone?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Tauriel found she was screaming as she watched the orc captain drive the end of his mace into Kíli’s body.  Perhaps she was saying his name; she wasn’t sure.  One detail alone held her attention: a single tear that ran down Kíli’s cheek as he watched her, seemingly oblivious to his own death-blow.  

 _Kíli!  I do—I do love you!_ she yearned to tell him as his eyes held hers.  Then Bolg dropped him and their connection was broken.  

A burst of grief, sharp and strong as anger, surged through her and she drew herself to her feet.  Bolg already strode towards her, confident of a second kill.  Tauriel flung herself at the orc, clinging to his neck as she swung her body round him to pull him off balance.  She knew from her earlier failed grapple that she lacked the strength to overpower him, but she didn’t mean to.  She planted a foot on an outcropping of rock and propelled them both over the cliff’s edge.  

She let go of him as they fell, hoping to regain her balance and tumble to a safe landing.  She felt her shoulder catch on stone and she skidded several body’s lengths along the cliff face before she slammed to a stop, the breath crushed from her lungs. Gasping in pain, she tried to stand.  Bolg likely survived the fall as well, and she must be up quickly to catch him off his guard.  Pain blazed along her back and ribs, stabbed through her shoulder, and she fell back.  No.  She must stand, must avenge him.  She tried once more, but her aching muscles refused to obey her.  Tears of anger at her own helplessness pricked her eyes.  

She thought she heard a scraping on the stone above her, then footsteps, heavy and slow and certain.  He was coming for her.  “No!” she sobbed.  This wasn’t how we meant for it to end, she thought.  It all hurt so much.  Perhaps death would be a welcome release.  She closed her eyes, waiting to feel the brief bite of weapon’s edge that would end her pain.  

There was a crash, as if the whole mountain had come down, yet no death-blow came.  For a moment, she thought she heard the sounds of fighting, and then pain flooded her perception.  Her ears buzzed and she felt sick.  Blurred shadows blocked her vision and the harsh, uneven sound of her own breathing seemed to fill her whole world.  She lay still, thinking of nothing but dragging one breath after another.  Slowly, it became easier to draw in air, and as her eyes cleared, she found herself staring up into a low, grey sky.

“Tauriel!”  A clear voice called her name.  Closer again, “Tauriel!”  

Legolas stooped over her and laid his hands cautiously on her shoulders.  “Are you hurt?” he asked urgently.  

She shook her head.  “Kíli!  He’s—” she gasped, clutching at his arm to drag herself upright.  

“Gently!”  Legolas held her back.  “You could have broken something.”  

Tauriel struggled against him.  “I have to go to him!”  Her brows were drawn, her eyes desperate.  

Legolas relented and helped her up.  “Legolas, he’s up there!”  She pointed to the cliff’s edge above them, already straining towards it.  She stumbled and caught herself by his arm.    
“All right; I’ll help you,” he said.  Supporting her, he lead her up a stairway cut into the rock.  Hurt as she was, she was nearly dragging him behind her in her eagerness.  

The climb seemed to take ages to Tauriel, with every muscle and sinew screaming as she pulled herself up each step.  At last they reached the top, and the ledge where she and Kíli had fought Bolg came into view.  She cried out as she sighted Kíli’s fallen body, so small on the empty shelf of stone.  She pulled away from Legolas and flew towards the dwarf with a last burst of strength that surprised even her.  

Tauriel threw herself across him.  “Kíli!” she sobbed.  His face was pale and he didn’t seem to be breathing.  She felt warm blood soaking her clothing and she pushed herself off him to look down at the wound in his chest.  There was too much red to see anything clearly; she guessed at broken ribs, a pierced lung.  

“No, my dear one,” she whispered, placing a hand on the wound, as if she could somehow hold his life in, keep his spirit from ebbing away.   She felt the last few flutters of a heartbeat. 

“Don’t leave me,” she gasped, nearly voiceless with grief.  Tears poured down her cheeks. 

_Please_ , she found herself pleading, her thoughts half a prayer, half stubborn will.  _Don’t take him from me. Take my strength, take my life and light.  Let my_ fae _strengthen his.  Please; I love him._   She didn’t know where the words came from.  They seemed the only thing to say.  

She bowed her head against his chest, bending upon him all her will and desire and love.  His body was so cold and still beneath her.  She felt the strength that she had held together for so long drain from her tired, aching limbs at last.  It was all over now.  Nothing mattered after this.  She felt herself falling, drifting into darkness, lost.  At the last, as if in a dream, she seemed to feel his fingers warm in hers, his hand grasping her own.  Then even that sensation faded and all was oblivion.

* * *

Kíli wandered through tunnels, passages, hallways in his dreams, surrounded by dead stone.  Not the stone of his regained home, rooted and strong and alive, as surely as if the mountain had heart and blood.  These were the halls of death.  

He followed the twists and turns of dark hallways, getting no nearer his goal, as if he were following the loops of an endless knot.  He was lost.  Or was it that he had lost something? 

There had been light and warmth, they had shone for him alone—and he had lost them.  The feeling that he had mislaid something important distressed him.  He must find it!  If only he could recall what he was looking for...   

After what must have been days, years, lifetimes of treading the same empty maze, over and over and over, the passages seemed to clear and straighten.  His sense of urgency lessened; he was getting somewhere at last.  The darkness lightened, and he slept.

He woke to find a stone roof over his head, living stone carved by dwarvish hands.  He breathed deeply, but that was a mistake: fire lanced along every rib and his gasp of pain became a cough.  While he was struggling to catch his breath, a familiar face appeared above him.

“Kíli!  You’re awake!” Bofur cried.  His face was tired but joyful.  

“Where am I?” Kíli managed.

“In Erebor.  We won the battle.”  Bofur’s voice was cheerful.  “Well, we might have had a little help.”

 _The battle._ Kíli closed his eyes.  That’s right.  He had seen his brother fall.  The memory was a new pain, sharper than any of his bodily wounds.  He could see Fíli’s lifeless face, his broken, bloodstained body.  And there was another image, another body covered in red: bloodied clothing, streaming red hair...

“Tauriel!” he gasped and strained to rise, before the pain in his ribs overcame him again.  He could not remember what had happened, but hadn’t he seen them carrying her limp, blood-sodden body?  “She— Where is she?” he nearly sobbed in his pain and sudden anguish.  

“Easy, laddie!” Bofur calmed him.  “Your elf girl lives, if that’s what ye mean.”

Kíli’s tension eased as relief and hope flowed through him.  He lay still, listening to his own ragged breathing as it slowed.  Each breath was an agony, but the pain seemed unimportant now.  _Thanks be to all the gods, even the elvish ones._   Tauriel had come for him: she loved him.  But he had wanted to keep the promise he had made to return to her so he could hear it from her own lips.

“By all accounts, she saved your life again,” Bofur continued in a moment.  “With your recklessness, we’ll have to keep her around.”  He chuckled.  

Kíli smiled a little, despite his discomfort.  He had saved her once that day, as well.  He would prove to her yet that he wouldn’t always need rescuing; he could take care of her, too.

Just as his brother had once looked out for him.  Tears swelled in his eyes, then fell.  Fíli’s was a loss he could never replace.  Life took even as it gave.  He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to the mingled emotions of joy and grief that battled in his already aching chest.  Soon he fell asleep.

* * *

“Tauriel.”  She stirred at the sound of her name.  “Tauriel!”  

She opened her eyes to see her prince bending over her.  

“Blessed Valar, it’s good to see your eyes again,” he breathed.  

Tauriel stirred restlessly.  There had been something important she needed to do.  She pushed herself upright, then froze halfway through the motion as the image of Kíli’s pale, lifeless face surfaced in her mind.  “Kíli! Is he—?”  She stared at Legolas, willing him to tell her the truth quickly, no matter how devastating.  

“The dwarf—Kíli,” he corrected himself, “is alive.  Thanks to you.”  He smiled wistfully.  

Tauriel sat up fully, swinging her legs to the floor to sit on the edge of the cot.  Her heart was pounding.  _He’s alive.  He’s alive, and I love him._ She focused on the patterned rug on the floor as her heartbeat slowed to a more normal pace.  That rug.  Didn’t it belong to the King?  She glanced up to see the walls of the royal pavilion, the King’s camp chair, a table set with wine and food.  

“What am I doing here?”  She looked up at Legolas.  The King had been angry with her, and justly so, because she had defied him.

“You’ve been asleep for two days,” he explained gently.  “My father thought you would need his tent more than he would.”  

“But he banished me,” she said, wondering.

Legolas smiled.  “He said to tell you he was wrong; that it was real.  And that there would be a place for you in the Greenwood, should you wish to return.”  

Tauriel stared at him, dumbfounded.  Thranduil was not known for his clemency.  

“He was there when we lifted you from Kíli’s body.  I believe he was quite moved.” 

Tauriel guessed he was not the only one.  She wondered if his son’s reaction had had anything to do with the King’s change of heart.  

She tried to stand, but her head swam.  Legolas caught her as she stumbled and helped her sit again.  

“Take it slowly,” he said.  “You spent much of your strength on him.  We thought you had died, at first.”

“Oh.”  So she had done it.  She had lent the flame of her own spirit to him.  She hadn’t known it would work; it had been the only thing she could think to try.  She realized now how mad she had been.  But wasn’t that what love was, a beautiful madness?

“How is he now?” she breathed. 

“He is out of danger.  He shouldn’t have been alive when his kin found him.  I made sure that one of our healers tended to him.”  Tauriel guessed that had cost Legolas more trouble than his words suggested.  

“Thank you,” she told him earnestly.  

“Of course,” he acknowledge with a bow of his head.  

Tauriel flushed and looked away.  She knew that he cared for her, and she felt almost guilty for receiving his help when it permitted her to love another.  

“There is food here, when you want.”  He broke the silence.  “Do you wish me to help you to the chair?”

She shook her head.  “Thank you,” she said again, the words seeming too small to express all she meant.  

“I will be outside.  If you need anything, call to the guard at the door.  He can find me.”

He nodded to her once more, and ducked through the curtained door.

Tauriel glanced down over herself.  She was wearing a soft grey robe.  Her own green one lay folded neatly beside her leather armor and her weapons on a traveling chest at the foot of the cot.  She glanced back at the table, where bread, sliced venison, cheese, and some fruit had been arranged on a platter.  Beside them on the table lay Kíli’s runestone.    
She pushed herself cautiously to her feet, pausing once she was upright to let the shadows clear from her eyes.  She felt lightheaded, like the time when she had taken a spider’s venomed bite, long ago.  She took a deep breath and placed one foot, then another.  It was only a few paces to the table, but time seemed to slow as she concentrated all her effort on the simple movements of shifting her weight from one leg to another.  She gripped the table’s edge at last, closing her other hand round the runestone.  Then she slid gracelessly into the chair.  

When she had once more collected what strength she had, she looked down at the stone in her hands.  The light gleamed and reflected in shifting colors beneath the surface of the stone, reminding her of the glowing curtains of light one could sometimes spot dancing in northern winter skies.  She turned the stone, gazing down on the runes carved on the other side.  What did they say?  

“ _Amrâlimê_ ,” he had said to her.  He had been right; she did know what that meant, what he had meant.  She smiled, remembering the earnestness of his eyes when he had parted from her on the shores of the lake.  “It’s a promise,” he had said.  A promise to come back, a promise to hear her answer.  

Unexpected tears filled her eyes.  His promise had so nearly been broken.  How could she have then borne the long years of her life, knowing that she had never spoken the words that mattered most, never told him she loved him when she had the chance?  She bowed her head, and a tear splashed down onto the carven runes in her hand.  “Kíli,” she whispered.  “ _Meleth nîn_.”  Even as the thought of her near loss broke her heart, she breathed a laugh.  _Silly_ , she admonished herself.  _Don’t grieve for a fate the gods never decreed.  When you see him, you will tell him._  

Tauriel wiped her eyes on her sleeve, and the runestone still held close in one hand, she reached for the food on the table.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _fae_ is not a typo; it is the Sindarin variant of the Quenya _fëa_ , "spirit, soul." I've tried to find the Sindarin variants of terms and the names of Valar when possible for this story.
> 
>  **helia** requested that I cross-publish this from my FF.net account. I am dividing the chapters a little differently this time, since the first few chapters were originally rather short. But while the chapter count will be different than on FF.net, the text remains the same.


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

 

“He’s been asking about you ever since he’s been well enough to sit up,” Balin was telling Tauriel as he led her through the halls of the mountain.  “Maybe now he’ll finally get some rest.”

She smiled slightly to herself.  “Thank you for bringing me to see him.  I, too, have been...anxious.”  

This portion of the fortress bustled with dwarves, Thorin’s original company having been joined by Dain’s army from the Iron Hills.  She felt their eyes on her as she passed.  They had heard what she had done for their new king, and their stares were not hostile, but rather wondering.  She, too, gazed about herself in amazement.  The halls and chambers of Erebor were truly overwhelming, even used as she was to the mountain fastness of the Greenwood.  Chasms plunged beneath her, vaults soared above, and all echoed with their footsteps.  The sound was slightly lonely yet, as if still carrying the memory of long, empty years.  But she imagined that once the dwarves reestablished their lives here, those echoes would ring with life, comforting and welcome.

They were passing through domestic quarters now.  The furnishings were musty with neglect, but already Tauriel could seen that things had begun to be tidied and lived in once more.  She thought of her own woodland home, grown wild and overgrown under the shadow of Dol Guldur.  The same work of tidying and renewal was to be done there, as well.  
Balin led her to a closed door and paused, turning to her.  “Not all of us may tell you so, but we all thank you for what you’ve done for the lad.”

Tauriel bowed.  “It has been my honor.”

Balin opened the door on a richly furnished bedchamber.  A dwarf sat in a chair with his back to them, reading aloud from a book.  Kíli sat up, listening, in a bed that seemed somewhat too small for him and all the pillows that had been propped behind him.  His face brightened as he saw her enter, and the other dwarf stopped reading to glance behind him.  When he saw who was there, he snapped his book shut and hurried to his feet.  

“Ori, at your service, Mistress Tauriel,” he stammered, bowing low.  

“Well met,” she answered, offering a bow of her own.  

“If you’ll excuse me, miss, I think Dori needed me for something.”  He set the book aside and shuffled out of the room, with one last embarrassed glance at her face as he passed her.

She stifled a smile as she watched him leave.  Just what were they all saying about her?  

“Tauriel.”  The sound of Kíli’s voice recalled her attention to him.  He was smiling gently at her, seemingly a little embarrassed himself.  As she crossed the room to him, Balin said from behind her, “I’ll leave you to yourselves.  If you need me, I’ll be out in the receiving room.”  The door closed with a soft click.

“Tauriel,” he said again as she gazed down at him.  “Do you mind if I keep saying your name?  It’s almost as beautiful as you are.”  He grinned at his own foolishness.  

“Kíli, you may say whatever you like.”  She sank to sit at the edge of the bed, facing him.  

His eyebrows rose in a mischievous expression.  “Anything?”

She nodded.  “Yes, but first—”  She caught his right hand in her own.  With her other hand, she withdrew the runestone from a pocket.  “I want to keep our promise.”  She set the stone in his fingers and curled them around it.  “ _Amrâlimê,_ ” she said, looking him in the eyes.  “ _Meleth nîn_.  I love you.”  She leaned forward and kissed him.  

When she sat back, he was grinning helplessly at her.  She found that she smiled, as well.  This moment of love acknowledged and returned was an unexpected joy, one she had not known before.

“They said,” he told her softly, “that you gave the fire of your spirit to me, that you nearly died.”  His hands moved over hers.  “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, with all my heart.”  She reached out and brushed his face with her fingertips.  “Watching you die, knowing that I loved you and that you would never know, was one of the most horrible things I’ve ever felt.  I was ready to give anything to keep you with me.”

He flushed, abashed.  “But I did know,” he corrected her.  “When you found me on Ravenhill, I knew.”  

Under the sweetness and trust of his gaze, Tauriel felt as if something were melting inside her.  It was an unaccustomed sensation, but not an unpleasant one.  “Tell me,” she said cautiously after a few moments.  “When you were fading, do you remember...?  I dreamed you took my hand.”

His expression grew thoughtful.  “Yes,” he said slowly.  “I remember now.  I dreamed that you drew me to a world of golden light.  I thought dying would not be bad if you were there to hold my hand.”

She laughed, a merry sound full of the triumph of joy over sorrow.  “I would rather hold it now, with you alive and here with me.”  She felt her cheeks warm as she spoke; she was unused to speaking her feelings so freely, and new ones, at that.

Kíli nodded contentedly and tightened his fingers on hers.

“How do you feel today?” she asked after a few moments.

He groaned softly.  “As if cave trolls have been using me as a welcome mat.  Not that cave trolls have welcome mats.  They’ve terrible manners, worse than dwarves,’ even.”  He coughed, overtaken by his enthusiasm, and then lay back, breathing deeply with a pained look on his face.

Tauriel could see the bandages wound about his chest beneath the robe he wore loosely over his shoulders.  The bandages were clean; he was no longer bleeding.  

“They said my ribs are broken and one went through my lung.”  Kíli stopped, seeing her face blanche.  “Oin’s been trying to get me to drink his special ‘healing tea.’”  He gestured to a mug on the bedside table.  “But it tastes horrid.  He won’t explain to me how dirty socks have healing properties.”

Tauriel lifted the nearly full mug of lukewarm tea and tasted it cautiously.  It had a pungent, herbal tang to it that she did not recognize, but she thought she tasted herbs that her own people valued for their healing powers.  Kíli seemed pleased to catch her biting back a grimace.  “Feverbane is very good for convalescents,” she pronounced authoritatively and handed the mug to him.

He took it from her and sipped resignedly at it.  “As long as you’re sure it’s not socks.”

Tauriel tried not to laugh as he stared at her over the rim of the mug.  

“What have you been reading?” she asked, reaching for the book Ori had left on the chair.  It proved to be a history of the elven kingdoms of Eregion, written in the common tongue.  

“I don’t really know much about the elves,” he explained as she turned the pages.  “Ori found that in the library for me.  But maybe you could tell me yourself.”

Tauriel smiled and looked back up at him.  “I would enjoy that very much.”  

“Well, Oin says I’m not going anywhere till my breathing gets stronger, so you might say I’m a captive audience, once again.”  He eyed her cheekily, before taking another sip of tea.

Tauriel regarded him with a raised eyebrow.  “I seem to recall you did your best to draw my interest in the King’s prison.”

“Well, what was I supposed to do?” he replied earnestly.  “You’d already captured me with your elvish grace.”

Kíli didn’t think he could ever tire of the sound of her clear, warm laugh. “Fair enough,” she said.

“So I knew I’d have to win you on natural clumsiness alone,” he finished.

“I think you’re quite charming.  And even eloquent,” she assured him.

He gave her a crooked smile.  

“You’re tired,” she observed.  “I should let you rest.”

Kíli nodded.  “Wait,” he directed, as she shifted to rise.  He swallowed the rest of the tea, made a bitter face, and handed her the mug.  

As she took it from him, she added, “I heard about your brother and your uncle.  Kíli, I am sorry.”

“Thank you,” he said softly.  

Impulsively, she leaned in and kissed his brow.  “That’s all the elvish healing I have for you today,” she teased as she stood.

“It’s enough.”

Tauriel replaced the mug on the bedside table and, with her heart lighter than it had been for many a day, crossed the room and closed the door softly behind her.

* * *

 

Tauriel visited him the next day and all the days after that.  Sometimes she told him elven lore or listened to Kíli’s tales of growing up in the Blue Mountains.  From the way that Fíli featured prominently in his stories, she guessed that Kíli must feel his brother’s loss dearly, though he rarely said so outright.  At other times, they discussed the progress being made to restore Erebor to its former glory.  Yet the one thing Kíli did not speak of was his new position as Thorin’s heir.  Tauriel wondered if he was afraid.

While there were some who still doubted that their prince should make such close alliance with an elf, Tauriel discovered that most of the dwarves in fact saw it as a propitious sign that their young leader had won the devotion of even one of their old enemies.  For such opinion, she was almost more grateful for his sake than for her own.

Thranduil’s folk had already returned to the Greenwood. She had remained, knowing that Kíli wanted her there, and she had been given a room in the royal quarters, where two dwarf-sized beds pushed together served nearly as well as her own mattress at home.

Tauriel felt uncertain, for the first time in her life, of where her own place was.  She had declared her love for this dwarf, and she knew she wanted to stay beside him.  Yet she had never before given any thought to leaving her native forest.  The idea took some getting used to.  And eventually, she would have to make some account of herself to her kin.  What would they say?

When Kíli was well enough, Tauriel began accompanying him to supper in one of the great dining halls.  She enjoyed watching him among his kin.  They were a merry people, she found, optimistic about a homeland reclaimed and a new prince upon the throne.  Some nights, after empty plates and platters had been cleared, there was music and singing.  Tauriel found she quite liked dwarf music.  It was perhaps a little less elaborately structured than elf music, but no less enlivening for all that.  Once Kíli had even been prevailed upon to play a fiddle which someone produced.  Tauriel, who had not known he played any instrument, had listened with delight.  Kíli, too, clearly enjoyed his appreciative audience.  “That was a jig,” he told her as he handed the fiddle back to its owner.  “When my ribs are better, I’ll teach you the dance that goes with it.”

Tauriel was surprised by how quickly restorations were coming.  The living quarters which had seemed shabbily luxurious on her first visit now felt warm, cozy even.  She herself had helped with cleaning, restoring, and reorganizing living quarters and reception halls, archives and storage rooms.  The only task the dwarves did not permit her to join was the counting and cataloguing of the treasure hoard.  She did not blame them, and truthfully, she wished no part in dealing with the gold that had cost many lives, dwarvish, elvish, and human alike. 

Kíli had been given more administrative duties, both to spare his injuries and to prepare him for his role as king.  Some days, Tauriel saw him often, other days rarely or not at all.  But they always came together with their friends—yes, the dwarves were becoming her friends, as well—for the evening meal in the cheerful, fire-lit hall.  

The rampart entrance and bridge to the mountain had been rebuilt and the masons’ efforts were now shifted to repairing the interior damage wrought by the dragon.  The forges and workshops were being rebuilt, and there was talk of recommencing the smith-work and relighting the forges (which had exhausted their fuel stores once more) as part of the coronation of the king.  This ceremony was to take place in the spring, in April, to commemorate the day Thorin and Company had set out from the house of Mr. Baggins, burglar.  

* * *

Tauriel and Kíli often walked together in the evenings, after their tasks were done for the day.  On this particular night in late January, the two paced the new ramparts at the mountain gate.  The watchmen had fallen back to give them privacy—that was one of the perks of being a prince, Kíli decided.

The air was chill, but there was no wind and the sky was clear.  Both wore cloaks trimmed with fur.  Tauriel’s had been repurposed from a damaged tapestry, since none of the dwarvish cloaks had been long enough for her.  Kíli thought the traditional dwarvish patterns on the cloth contrasted and accentuated her exotic elven beauty.  He liked seeing her in them, liked the idea of her being part of his world.  

Tauriel was telling Kíli of how earlier that day, she and Dori had found one of the old wine cellars with nearly all its inventory intact.  They had spent the day cataloguing the contents and estimating how much was still drinkable.  There were some brandies that ought to have aged quite nicely.  The two of them had gotten into a good-natured argument regarding whether elves or dwarves had better taste in spirits.  

“I promised to bring him a cask of spiced mead from the King’s cellars the next time I am in the Greenwood,” Tauriel finished.

“And when is the next time you’ll be home?” Kíli asked after a moment.

“It has been on my mind to return soon,” she confessed.  “There are things I wish to settle there.  I want to see how the work of reclaiming the wood has come.  I should tell my King why he will be losing his lieutenant and my friends why they must share me with your mountain.  And, truth be told, I would like to freshen my wardrobe somewhat.”

She had worn only her green robes since she had stayed in Erebor.  Kíli tried to imagine what other sorts of things must be in her closet at home.  He wasn’t sure what elves found fashionable, but he was sure she must look lovely in anything.  

“I understand,” he said.  “You’ve a home and kin that you must be missing.  I’ve felt a bit selfish, lately, keeping you here.  But I thank you.”  He reached out and caught her hand.  “Just...promise you’ll come back in time for my coronation?”  Tauriel could tell from his tone how much this request meant to him.

“Of course!”  She paused mid stride and turned to look at him.  “I would not miss it, meleth nîn.”  

Kíli smiled widely at her.  “I want all of my friends to be there.”  His expression grew more thoughtful.  “I think I’ve been getting used to the idea of being a king.  I was terrified at first.  Everyone always expected Fíli to be king someday.  They didn’t really worry much about me.  Mahal’s forge, I never worried much about me.”  

Tauriel smiled at that.

“Oi, I know I’m reckless,” he admitted.  “But Fíli and Thorin were always there to get me out of a scrape.  I never expected to be left on my own, to be _king_ on my own.”

“But you’re not alone,” Tauriel reminded him.  “You have all your friends to help you.”

“I know.”  He nodded.  “That’s why I want you all there.”

“We will be,” she said, and squeezed his hand.

“You know, this hasn’t turned out to be exactly the adventure I thought I was setting out on.”  His eyes were solemn and a little sad.

“It’s not the adventure I expected, either,” Tauriel told him honestly.  “But it’s a good one, is it not?”  

He regarded her for a few moments before answering.  “Aye, it is.”  The edge of his mouth quirked up in a smile.  “I suppose we didn’t lose anything more than we’d been willing to give.  And some of us found a bit more, perhaps, than we hoped.”

Kíli turned to continue along the wall and drew her after him.  The moon was a few days off from the full, and the stone walls shone with silver-blue light.  At the end of the wall, a flight of  stairs led up to a short guard tower, empty now out of courtesy.  The two climbed the tower and crossed to the parapet to look out at the valley below.

Tauriel was gazing up at the stars, as she always did when they came here.  She seemed to fill herself with their light, as if she lived by it as much as by food or drink.  Perhaps she did.    
Kíli watched her watch the heavens.  “You know,” he said momentarily, “I can understand why you love it, the silver light of the moon and the stars.  It suits you.  It brings out the creamy color of your skin, the fire in your hair, the light in your eyes...”  Tauriel looked back down at him.  She was truly glowing, he thought.  “We dwarves perhaps look better by lamplight or the light of our forges.  But the starlight, it’s for you,” he breathed.  

“The elves awakened to the light of the stars,” she told him.  “And for those of us who never journeyed to the west, it is the nearest we shall come to the blessed light of Valinor.”  

“Even if gazing on you is the closest I come to that sacred light, I would call myself truly blessed,” Kíli answered solemnly.  

“Did you know,” Tauriel said, “that your maker Mahal, whom we call Óli, is also a great friend of the elves?  He loved the Noldor, and taught their greatest smith, who went on to create the Silmarils, chiefest of all the gems.  And while there may be little love between your people and mine, Óli himself is the consort of Ivann, creatress of the trees and all living things, and much beloved by the sylvan elves.”  She smiled warmly.  “So, you see, perhaps there is not so much distance between us as some may think.”  

“Except in height,” Kíli noted, his tone gently self mocking.  He didn’t mind that she stood above him; he wouldn’t have changed her in the slightest respect.  But he had never so wanted to kiss her, and it was nearly impossible to manage gracefully when his head didn’t even reach her shoulder.  

Tauriel laughed.  “Easily enough remedied,” she said, and catching his hand, drew him back to the stairs down from the watchtower.  She descended the first few steps and turned round to face him.  Her face was now level with his.

He smiled, both pleased and embarrassed to have achieved his wish.  Tauriel regarded him expectantly.  Kíli slid his fingers through her beautiful hair that shone like burnished copper. The curve of her neck fit perfectly into his hand.  As he drew her to him, her leaf-green eyes held his, and he found he had to close his own before his lips met hers—there was so much starlight, or love or joy, in her eyes that he felt it would spill over into him, filling him till he could contain no more and he burst.  

He kissed her, more fully than he had yet dared, and she answered him, leaning into him in a way that made him forget the physical inequality between them. She was simply a woman who fit into his arms and whom he wanted to hold.  

He remained with his arms around her, even after the kiss had ended.  She had nestled her face into the hollow of his neck, and he found his lips just brushed her earlobe.  He loosed one arm from her shoulders and lightly traced a finger up the sweeping edge of her ear.  She giggled against him.  “Sorry, I’ve sort of always wanted to do that,” he admitted, embarrassed.  He could feel his cheeks warm.  “It’s all right.” Her voice was muffled.  “Even we are not unmoved by a fine pair of ears.”  He sighed contentedly.  She smelled nice, like trees and rain-washed soil and maybe a little of apple blossoms.  

Tauriel shifted in his arms and lifted her head at last.  “I suppose we should go back, or your guards will accuse me of practicing elvish sorcery on you.”  She giggled as she met his face.  “Your hair!”  She reached out and pulled free the already loosened clasp that had held his hair back.  “Turn around,” she instructed.  He obeyed, and as she was tucking his hair back into place, she continued, “Among the elves, fine hair is esteemed a great beauty.  Yours would be much admired.”  

He chuckled.  “I’m glad to hear there is something about me for you to find attractive.”  

“Kíli!”  she scolded him.  “I’ll have you know that it is some time since I have considered you quite handsome.  Not for a dwarf, but as yourself.”  

“But you didn’t think I was at first!” he countered triumphantly.  

“Well, no,” she admitted, sounding embarrassed herself.  “But I did find you interesting.”  She fastened the clasp and tugged at his hair one last time.  “There, no evidence of elvish sorcery to be seen.”

“Oh, but they’ll know,” Kíli protested as he follow Tauriel down the stairs.  “I never spend that much time on it myself.  It’ll look far too nice.”  

Tauriel smirked at him over her shoulder.  “I’m not falling for that, master dwarf.”

Kíli shrugged.  “Fine.  Just, wait—”  And he caught her about the shoulders before she could step off the last stair and into the sight of the waiting watch.  He placed a kiss behind her ear and whispered, “Thank you.  For giving me my life and your love.”

Tauriel took his hand and wound her fingers through his.  As the two of them came in from the ramparts, she realized that she was no longer troubled at the thought of finding her place in the unexpected new world she had become part of.  She did not know what it would be like to stay here, to love this dwarf, just as Kíli did not know what it would be like to rule as king.  But not knowing was no reason to turn back.  This was their adventure, and she would find out where it led with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Óli_ is the Sindarin version of _Aule_. _Ivann_ is (as far as can be guessed from limited sources) the Sindarin name for _Yavanna_.
> 
> This is originally where I thought I would end this story. But I couldn't stop myself from imagining what would happen next, and I daydream in words, so it kept going from here.


	3. Chapter 3

Coming home felt, well, different than Tauriel had expected.  It wasn’t simply that the wood felt lighter, freer, more open than it had ever been within her memory.  Even under the leafless, snow-laden branches of winter, the forest already felt more alive than it had when she had walked out from under those same trees mere months ago, following the urge of duty—as well as a somewhat less definable prompting—towards the dwarves who had been under their watch, and whose safety she still felt was her concern.  

Yes, her forest had changed.  But so had she.  She had seen the world outside her woodland home, met some of the people in it.  She was sure, now, of what she had begun to feel back then: that she could not live in isolation, as if their lives had nothing to do with hers.  Tauriel had found that the happenings out in the world were very much much concerned with the things even she, a wood elf, cared for.  Or perhaps she had grown to care for things beyond what she had known before.  Maybe it was the same thing.  

She was greeted affectionately by the forest sentries, most of whom were her friends.  There was some good-natured ribbing about her extended stay in Erebor, yet no one challenged her friendship with their erstwhile captives and nearly enemies.  She supposed she had Thranduil’s pardon to thank for that.  Her defiance of him had been quite public, and his kindness to her after the battle had been equally so, when he had granted her his quarters as she recovered from her salvation of Kíli, a sacrifice that had proved nearly fatal to herself.  

Tauriel was grateful that her friends in the guard had not made an issue of her new loyalties, for she feared her parents would not let it go so easily.  In truth, she wasn’t sure how they would respond.  Her mother, at least, had always hoped that Tauriel’s close friendship with the prince would come to something.  Tauriel had never had the heart to tell her that the King would never approve of such a union.  Proud as he was of a lineage that traced back to the Teleri of Doriath, the fair and ancient kingdom of Elu Thingol, he would hardly permit his son to chose a woodland elf like her, whose kindred had hung back upon the twilight borders of the world and never dwelt among their blessed kin returned from the west.  She had never cared for Legolas in that way, anyhow, though sometimes she had allowed herself to think of him as the brother she had always wanted.  As for her father, he remembered tales of an old quarrel with dwarves over payment and precious stones, and had always spoken of them as a stubborn, distasteful race motivated more by greed than by honor.  His opinion had never troubled her overmuch; she had always considered it more as an incidental grudge rather than a universal fact.  But she did not relish the prospect of hearing him speak ill of her new companions and friends, who had proven themselves loyal and true to one another, as well as to herself.  She would not allow herself to imagine what he might say in objection to the one she loved.  

In truth, her initial meeting with her parents had not proved the confrontation she had feared.  Her mother had held her close, breathing her thanks to the Valar.  “When we first heard how many had fallen, we feared we’d lost you,” she said, releasing Tauriel at last.  “Later, we learned how right we nearly were, though not for the reason we had guessed.”  She smoothed her daughter’s hair, regarding her with thoughtful, troubled eyes.  “So it is true,” she said, as if she read something in her daughter’s face.  “It’s too late, and you have already made your choice.”  And then she had wept softly against Tauriel’s shoulder and said no more.

To her relief, her father had not questioned her, but merely welcomed her home and kissed her hair, as he always did. Yet he, too, had fixed her with such a wondering gaze that Tauriel wished she knew what it was he saw.  Tauriel knew she must answer them regarding her love for Kíli soon enough, yet in the meantime, she had still other meetings to worry about.  

* * *

 On the morning after her return, she presented herself to her King.  She had not faced him since he had pronounced her banishment, and while he had shown her kindness in the aftermath of the battle, she could not guess what his feelings regarding her would be, now that he had had time to consider her actions.  

Standing before his chamber door, she found her palms sweating.  She brushed them against her skirts, settled her shoulders with a deep breath, and knocked.  

“You may enter,” the King’s dispassionate voice called.

She drew open the door and stepped in to the room where she had given reports and received her orders so many times before.  

“Your Majesty.”  She curtseyed, unsure, for the first time in ages, of how to address her superior.

“Tauriel,” Thranduil spoke as she rose, “It is good to have you back.”

She smiled, relaxing slightly.  “It is good to be back,” she said.

“And yet,” he continued, a cryptic smile of his own playing over his lips, “You will not stay.”  

“My lord,” Tauriel stammered.  “I appreciate your kindness to me, and I would not disobey you, but I have found new allegiances that bind me as much as my love for the Greenwood.”

“It did not trouble you to disobey me before,” he noted, almost amused.  

Tauriel’s color deepened.  “Forgive me,” she said.

“Tauriel,” he addressed her, his impassive expression softening somewhat, “You have long been one of my most trusted lieutenants, able to see and consider what others would not.  It occurs to me that no less may be true now.”  He sighed, and Tauriel could see the weight of many cares in his face then.  “Much elven blood was spilt that day.  I would not see such loss again.  And I would not command my people against their hearts.”

Tauriel stared at him, unable to find anything to say.  

“I must confess, I cannot imagine what you see in a dwarf,” he continued, reassuming his usual haughty air, an attitude with which Tauriel was both familiar and comfortable.  “But I suppose that is hardly my concern.  It is my concern, however, that we establish more . . . favorable relations with Erebor.  You told me once, I recall, that we ought to take more interest in the world outside our borders.  I find that such interest ought to extend to our neighbors, at least.  And you are in an ideal position to promote such relations.”

“You would make me your envoy?” she queried, surprised.

Thranduil’s mouth lifted in a knowing half-smile.  “I suspect you would act as one, whether I empowered you or not.  Let us at least legitimize the role.”

“I am honored.  And indeed,” she added with a soft laugh, “I seem to have stepped into that part already.  Please allow me to present you a gift from the Prince of Durin’s house.  He offers it as a token of friendship and appreciation for the people of the Greenwood and their King.”  

She produced a small, intricately decorated casket and presented it to the king.  

He took it wordlessly and opened it.  Inside were five large, finely cut emeralds of surpassing brilliancy and hue.  Kíli had selected them without her assistance, and she had immediately approved his choice.  

“The Prince has discerning taste,” Thranduil commented drily.  “I foresee we shall understand one another well enough.”

Tauriel made no effort to hide her smile as she curtseyed once more.  “Thank you,” she said warmly.  

“And Tauriel,” the King added, “I expect you to resume your duties as lieutenant until you return to Erebor.”  

“Yes, my lord,” she answered happily.  

“You are dismissed.”

Tauriel nodded respectfully, and exited the room, feeling giddy at finding such unexpected favor.

* * *

She met Legolas in the mess hall later that day.  As the friends he had been seated with left, their meal over, she joined him with a decanter of wine.  He regarded her carefully as she seated herself opposite him.  “Tauriel!  You look well,” he said, and she thought he sounded almost self-conscious.  

“I saw your glass is empty,” she teased, hoping to reestablish their accustomed ease together.

“Indeed,” he affirmed, offering it to her to refill.  “I missed you.”  

She knew he spoke as her friend, for all that he had wished for more from her.  Tauriel smiled.  “As did I.”  

“Patrols are certainly less...exciting without you there to drag us into the thick of things,” he noted teasingly.

“I do not!” she protested, knowing it was partly true.  

Legolas silently regarded her, one perfect brow barely arched.

“Anyway, I’ll be happy to be out with you all, running down squirrels and spiders again,” she returned, and he smiled at their old joke.  

“I think the squirrels have missed you.  They’ve been almost polite.”

“I told you you’d be able to teach them some manners if you kept at it,” Tauriel returned.

“Tell me, how do dwarves compare with squirrels?” he asked, in the easy, light manner she knew.

“Less trouble and more fur.”

Legolas grinned and seemed to relax somewhat, evidently relieved she could return the jest.  “But truly, were you happy there, in Erebor?  I confess, I cannot imagine how you can stand it to be the lone elf in a mountain full of dwarves.”  He watched her curiously.

“I was.  Dwarves can be quite gracious, when their life and honor, to say nothing of their dignity, are unchallenged,” she noted with ironic humor.  “I was nearly always met with respect, even from those who misliked me.  They are an honorable folk and will not forget what I have done.”

“I’m glad,” he said.   She thought he wanted to say more, but suddenly there was that unspoken thing between them again, the choice she had made that could not be taken back. 

“It will be good to have you at my back once more,” he said finally.  Legolas clasped her arm, then rose.  “I’ll see you on patrol tomorrow,” he said over his shoulder, and left her.  

Tauriel sighed and poured herself the last glass from the decanter.  She drank it slowly, wishing her relationship to Legolas could remain what it had been before, something fond and close and with no more complexity beyond that which existed between two long-time friends.  But she knew it was foolish to imagine things would never change, especially now that she had made choices that would take her away from her home.  Could she even save his friendship, when she had answered his love by choosing another?  She propped her face in her hands, and a tear splashed down on the oaken tabletop.  Before she could indulge her melancholy, a familiar voice hailed her.  

“Tauriel!”  She glanced up to see a young elf woman with dark braids and a merry smile approaching her.  Silwen had been her closest friend since childhood.  

“I was on my way out to patrol last night when I heard you had returned.  If our party hadn’t already been undermanned, I would have come see you then!”  

Tauriel rose to return her friend’s embrace.  

“What’s wrong?” Silwen asked, seeing her tears.  

Tauriel quickly brushed her cheeks with her sleeve, unsure of how to answer.  

“It’s the Prince, I suppose,” her friend supplied.  “He’s been brooding since he came back.”  Tauriel simply nodded.  

“I just got off duty; come home with me and you can tell me all you want.  Oh, Taur, I’ve missed you!  I’m so glad you’re back.”  Silwen hugged her again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've kept the name of Greenwood for Mirkwood, since Mirkwood or Taur e-Ndaedelos (Forest of Great Fear) are almost certainly names given by outsiders, rather than what the elves call their home, even a home fallen into darker days! And Kili, wishing to be diplomatic, isn't likely to address Thranduil as "King of that horrible scary forest," either, despite having had up-close and personal experience with just how horrible and scary it can be. Hence, he says Greenwood here, through Tauriel.
> 
> Those are the Emeralds of Girion, mentioned in chapter 18 of _The Hobbit_ as the gift of Dain to the Elvenking. They're not mentioned in the films, so I thought I'd throw them in here instead.


	4. Chapter 4

Silwen shook out the dark waves of her hair and, accepting a glass of light, golden wine from Tauriel, settled into the cushioned seat beside her friend.

“So,” Silwen prompted once she had tasted her wine, “You chased some dwarves and were banished; you outlived dragon’s fire; fought in a war; you fell in love and saved one prince’s life, while the other returned without you.  Perhaps you had better start at the beginning!”

Tauriel nodded.  “What, exactly, _have_ you heard?”  

“Everyone knew you left the Greenwood with Legolas, despite the King’s order to close the borders.  We guessed you were concerned over the latest orc incursion; it had been no secret that you pushed for expanded patrols in those last few months.  

“The rest was just gossip when the army returned from Erebor.  Your banishment was common knowledge, of course, as was the King’s favor to you after the battle.  But some heard you had been alone in Laketown when it was burned by Smaug.  And people even said you’d been found on the battlefield, nearly dead in the arms of the dwarf prince, though the ones who told me _that_ seemed to believe it less than the dragon story.”

Tauriel smiled self-consciously, yet said nothing despite her friend’s curious glance, so Silwen continued.

“I finally got Legolas to tell me that you had both followed the dwarves to Laketown and that he had left you behind to heal one who had been injured.  He said you had found him the next day, and the two of you had ridden to Gundabad, only to return to Erebor with an orc army on your heels.  And he confirmed you had followed the dwarf prince into battle and that you’d ransomed his life with your own when he fell.”  She looked knowingly at Tauriel and added,  “Legolas never, in fact, said you loved the dwarf, but I thought that was clear enough from the tale.  He was the one in Laketown...?” Silwen finished expectantly.  

“Yes.”  Tauriel sipped the wine, her expression curious.  “Legolas didn’t tell you it was Kíli that I healed?  I suppose he couldn’t, when I chose Kíli over him.”

Her friend nodded.  “I wondered if he loved you.”

“Oh, Silwen, Legolas made it quite clear when he came after me.  And I couldn’t say anything, because I needed him—wanted him—at my side.  And because I couldn’t tell him I was falling in love with a dwarf.”

“Legolas has long been your friend; I know he would not grudge you the support that you needed.”

“No,” Tauriel agreed, “I don’t believe he would.  All the same, I fear I’ve hurt him.  And I wish I had not.”  She sighed.  “He is the reason I was upset earlier.”

Silwen laid an arm across her friend’s shoulders in a brief hug.  “I know how close you two have been.  I wondered what would happen if one of you fell in love.”  

Tauriel laughed in spite of herself.  “I suppose you never thought to include a dwarf in your conjectures!”  

“Indeed not!”  Silwen grinned conspiratorially.  “I’m sorry I was on border patrol when that all happened.  I wish I had seen the dwarf who could steal your heart! I’m not sure how to imagine him.”  She tried to school the smile from her face, with limited success.  “Forgive me, Taur, but the last dwarves I saw were old, quite fat, and had beards so long they wore them tucked up in their belts to keep from treading on them!  I’m sure your Kíli must be handsomer than that, but I confess I cannot imagine him any other way!”  Silwen hid her face against her friend’s shoulder, both amused and apologetic at once.

Tauriel laughed.  “It’s all right!  I should have said much the same, had you asked me to tell you of dwarves not long ago.  I can assure you that Kíli is young, not at all fat, and as for the beard, he wears his trimmed quite short.”  

Silwen looked up at her.  “Well, that’s a relief.  I was worried about you trying to kiss him through all that hair!”  

“Sil!”  Tauriel shoved her friend playfully.  She was not offended; Silwen and she had teased each other for years over everything from the way they wore their hair to one another’s skill on the archery range, and suitors were not exempt from their jests.  Indeed, Tauriel was grateful that her friend’s first concern over her love for Kíli had apparently been that he make her happy.  It was obvious that Silwen wanted to find what made him attractive to Tauriel so that she might see it too, and equally obvious that she was failing.

Tauriel continued, earnest now.  “Kíli must be nearly our age, according to the reckoning of his folk.  He has brown eyes and very handsome dark hair.  And he is somewhat tall for a dwarf, though even so, his head doesn’t clear my shoulder.”  She laughed at the comical expression on Silwen’s face.  “But his shoulders are broad and his hands strong, and promise I don’t feel unequally matched when he puts his arms around me.  

“He’s bold and loyal, and teasing, and kind.  He’s also an archer, and he plays the fiddle quite merrily.  And sometimes he talks like a poet.”

Silwen laughed.  “I thought you had decided against poets.”  

“Only the kind who write sonnets,” Tauriel returned with a smirk.  “Besides, you haven’t heard what he said to me the first time we met.  When I put him in his cell in the King’s prison, he asked if I was going to search him, since there was no telling what he might have in his trousers!”  She snorted.  

Silwen stared at her, both delighted and aghast at once.  “What did _you_ say?”

“Oh, I told him I’d likely find nothing, and locked the door in his face,” Tauriel recalled with amused satisfaction.  

Silwen burst into laughter.  “Of course!”  

“I couldn’t believe he was trying for my attention!  I had slighted him earlier, you know.  He had asked me for a weapon, when we fought off the spiders, and I had not bothered to make my refusal anything but insulting.  But his clumsy flirtation was rather endearing, in a hopeless sort of way,” Tauriel admitted.  “I—”  She flushed, embarrassed at the memory.  “I even defended him to Legolas, who was clearly evincing his offense at the trousers remark.”

“Oh?” Silwen prompted.

“I suggested I found Kíli attractive, and I’m afraid I hit home!”  She sighed.  “Poor Legolas, I shouldn’t vex him!  But he does make it so easy, sometimes,” she finished fondly.  

“And _did_ you?  Find him attractive, that is?”

“I— Well.  No.  I supposed that, by the standards of his folk, he might be considered handsome, but not enough to turn my head.

“Still I was curious.  He wasn’t what I expected from a dwarf, neither harsh nor ill-tempered.  He seemed so young and full of wonder.  I could see that to him, all of this was new, and I almost felt sorry that his first glimpse of the world should land him in a prison cell.”

Silwen shook her head in mock disapproval.  “Tauriel, you’ve gone soft if you’re pitying the King’s prisoners!  Even the young, sweet ones.”  

“I know!  It seemed harmless at the time; I merely thought I was lessening his hardship by  being kind.  I made a final pass through the prison at the end of my shift, and I stopped to speak with him.  I thought he resented me at first, but then he relented and I knew his bravado was only an act.”  She smiled, remembering.  “We talked for quite a long time.  He told me of many things they’d seen on their journey so far, and some of the dangers they’d passed through.  Nothing, however, that would have answered the King’s curiosity, and therefore, nothing I felt bound to report!” she interjected in response to Silwen’s marveling glance.  “By the time I arrived at the feast, all of the best wine had been drunk.  I hadn’t even had time to change, and Legolas seemed strangely put-out, though he would not tell me why.”

“I’m sorry, my dear, but it takes more than ‘curious’ to account for missing the Feast of Starlight,” Silwen remarked pointedly.  

“All right, by that time I was...charmed.  Kíli was friendly and artless, and his smile was so earnest and sweet.”

Silwen sighed.  “Oh, Tauriel, you were already falling for him!”

“I know.  But you can hardly expect I could admit it to myself!  He was my prisoner, and a dwarf, at that.  I knew I couldn’t fall in love with someone like him.”  She laughed at herself.  “Couldn’t fall in love with a perfectly charming young man, that is.  I _was_ rather foolish for pretending I didn’t see him that way.  Amidst all the commotion the next morning when we discovered they had escaped, I even found I would be sorry if I never saw him again to wish him well.”

“I heard how you nearly stopped them at the last river gate,” Silwen noted.  “Didn’t you see him then?”

“I saw him, but that was all.  We were hard-pressed to defend ourselves and the dwarves, much less recapture them.  Did you know, it was Kíli who braved the wall, unarmed, to open the portcullis?  He took an injury to do so.  I’ve told no one, but,” Tauriel added, her tone confessional, “I covered him as best I could.  If I hadn’t, the dwarves likely would not have escaped.”

Silwen opened her mouth, but said nothing.

Tauriel continued, “But if they’d stayed trapped behind the gate, I don’t doubt but that some would have been slain.  They were, if you’ll pardon the expression, fish in a barrel.”  

Silwen found words then.  “Tauriel, don’t imagine you betrayed your duty,” she said warmly.  “Your attention to the good of all those under your command is the reason I, and so many in the guard, admire and respect you.  You’ve never needlessly sacrificed others simply to follow your orders.”

Tauriel caught Silwen’s hand.  “Thank you,” she said, and Silwen could see she had indeed been troubled by such thoughts.  “Afterwards, we learned that orcs out of Moria had been following Thorin and his men for some time, but the King would do nothing.  And...  The orc we interrogated claimed they had fatally wounded Kíli with a poisoned blade.”

Silwen’s eyes widened.  “So you did go after him,” she noted.  “I wondered, once Legolas had confirmed the rumors, whether Kíli had been the reason you left.”

“I knew his companions would not have the skill to treat him!” Tauriel protested.  “And I couldn’t pretend his life didn’t matter, that I didn’t care.”  

“I was worried about you, when I returned from patrol and heard you’d disobeyed the King and left the forest, even though Legolas went with you.”

“I know; it was reckless of me,” Tauriel admitted.  “I was angry that no one troubled over what became of them once the dwarves were out of our hands.  Kíli was not the only one in danger.

“I was justified in my fears: when we caught up with the remnant of Thorin’s party in Laketown, we arrived barely behind the orcs that had been tracking them.  We saved Kíli and his friends, as well as the Laketown family who had been helping them.  And Kíli!”  Tauriel’s face betrayed the concern she had felt.  “The poor boy was raving with fever by then; it was consuming the last of his strength!  Some blessed soul had thought to fetch some athelas, and I used it to purify the wound.

“He recognized me then.  He was delirious, but he still said enough for me to know what he felt.  And the next morning, after we escaped Laketown, he asked me to come with him.”  She paused, her cheeks flushed slightly.  “I pretended not to understand when he told me he loved me.  That really was the worst of all my foolishness!  Because I did know I could love him in return.  I just couldn’t see how it was supposed to work for us.  I was afraid to admit to wanting something that could not be.  But Kíli was certain, I think, that all that mattered was wanting it.  He put his hope in me, and I was drawn to him all the more for that.  And in the end, he was right.”

Silwen smiled gently.  “I understand, now, why you love him.  You never have been content looking only to the past, as so many of us do.  And Kíli made you want to believe in something new.”

Tauriel nodded.  “What I feel when I’m with him, I’ve never known before.  He makes me feel...alive,” she finished with a smile, remembering what he had once said to her.  

“You do look different, you know,” Silwen said thoughtfully.  “It’s your eyes.  Their light is bolder, somehow, as if...”  She hesitated, uncertain.

“What?” Tauriel urged.

“It’s as if it is no longer your spirit alone that shines in your eyes.”

Tauriel flushed deeply.  The change Silwen had described was one the elves saw in those who had wed.  It was how their people knew, without asking, whether one was free or bound to another.

“I haven’t— If that’s what you mean,” she stammered.  Acts of passion were rare among their kind, and if Silwen thought she had yielded and slept with him, her friend must think Tauriel had truly taken leave of her senses. Elves were by nature chaste.

“Forgive me!  You misunderstand!”  Silwen appeared equally alarmed and embarrassed.

Tauriel laughed, guessing her meaning at last.  “No, we did not pledge ourselves in secret, if that’s what you are thinking.  When I saved him, I reached out to his spirit with mine and fed it with my fire, lest it die out completely and forsake his body.  I suppose we share a true bond now.”

“Tauriel,” Silwen said.  “If there was ever to be one of the Eldar to choose a dwarf, it would be you.”   

“Oh?”

“When you know what you have to do, you never stop to ask if it’s impossible.”

Her friend laughed.  “Well, I suppose we are suited for each other.  He, too, can be rather bold.”  Tauriel’s smile turned rueful.  “And now I understand what amazed my parents so when they saw me.  My mother cried as if I were indeed dead on the battlefield as she had feared.  I thought _Ada_ would make more trouble over it than she.  He seemed more surprised than grieved, though.”

Silwen paused thoughtfully over her wine before responding.  “Taur, if it had been anyone but you, I would have said you were mad.  Perhaps you are, a little bit, but in the good way that I’ve always liked about you,” she interjected fondly.  “I still cannot imagine wanting to settle your love on a mortal, a dwarf.  But I trust you.  Forgive the rest of us for not being able to understand.”

Tauriel sighed.  “There is nothing to forgive, my friend.  And while the others may trouble me, they do not surprise me, nor can I blame them.”  She set her glass down and looped her arms round her friend’s shoulders.  “Thank you for believing me.”  

Silwen hugged her in return.  “Don’t thank me yet!  I’m going to make you take me back to Erebor to meet him!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize if this chapter is too dialogue heavy! I wanted to show why Tauriel would drop everything and go chasing after some dwarves that she had only just met. Plus, here you get my interpretation of why Tauriel would have anything to do with Kili after that really dreadful trousers line. (See "Starlight Reflected," the first story in this series, for the Fili and Kili companion scene to this one.)
> 
> I've opted not to use the term _morgul_ for the poison used on Kili, mainly because I have never liked the idea that he was wounded by the same kind of weapon as the Witch King later used to stab Frodo. Not only does it seem like too rare of a weapon for orc peons to be carrying, but I hardly think that a wood elf like Tauriel would have been able to cure a cursed wound that only Elrond was able to heal in the book. Of course, since _morgul_ literally means "black magic," the elves could surely have referred to any kind of cursed poison by that term. But I want to distance Kili's injury from Frodo's. 
> 
> In "Laws and Customs of the Eldar," Tolkien states that elves can tell from the appearance and speech of another whether he or she is married. I've never been quite sure how to imagine that would work, but Silwen's description of the change she sees in Tauriel is my best guess.
> 
> Also, as a gratuitous side note, I'm convinced that the Elvish healing scene in Desolation of Smaug is straight out of Spenser's _Faerie Queene_ , as I argue in a blog post [here](https://egotistsclub.wordpress.com/2015/04/10/in-which-i-justify-my-fangirl-nonsense-with-elizabethan-verse/). (Okay, it's probably not really, but I like to pretend it is because I'm a literature nerd.)


	5. Chapter 5

Kíli respected Daín.  His manner could be brusque at times, but he was wise and well-liked by the dwarves of his clan.  And Kíli was finding he could rely on him for advice on overseeing the growing dwarf city in Erebor.  

Yet Kíli found he could not feel truly fond of his cousin for the simple fact that Daín firmly, if fairly tacitly thus far, opposed his relationship with Tauriel.  It made sense that Daín should resent her for her allegiance to the Elvenking; Thranduil's army had even briefly attacked Daín's forces, though Tauriel had not been part of that.  Furthermore, Thorin’s account of Mirkwood’s betrayal in Erebor’s hour of peril was well-known among his kin, and for many of those beyond Erebor, the only tale they knew of the woodland elves.  Kíli had grown up hearing those same stories, and he knew he shouldn’t blame Daín, or any of the others, for their distrust.  But Tauriel had not been what he had expected—for one thing, she was far more pretty!  But beneath her elven hauteur she had proved kind and sweet and maybe even a little vulnerable.  She wasn’t like the proud and stubborn Elvenking.  Why couldn’t Daín see that?

Kíli had vainly hoped that Daín would forget the matter during Tauriel’s absence.  But really, was anyone likely to forget he waited for her, if for no other reason than that he spent many of his free evenings finding ways to improve her old rooms and make them more suitable for an elf?

Indeed, as spring drew on and Tauriel’s promised return grew near, Kíli could sense Daín was preparing to say something about the elf maid.  Thus, he was not truly surprised, despite being caught somewhat off his guard, when Daín broached the topic one afternoon following a conference regarding the distribution of lodging and labor among the newest arrivals from the Iron Hills.  

“Listen: I’ve avoided the subject long enough, hoping you’d come to it on your own, but the elf girl; it can’t go on,” Daín had begun sternly.

Kíli shuffled the pages he had been glancing over and looked up to meet Daín’s face.  He wished Balin had not just left the room moments before.  Likely, Daín had noticed his exit and seized the chance to corner his young cousin.   All the answers Kíli had rehearsed in his mind were suddenly gone, and he found himself stammering, “It’s not—”

Daín cut him off.  “If you were still only Dís’s baby boy, no one might care.  But you’re to be king!  And in barely more than a month!”

The reference to his youth touched a nerve.  Kíli knew that he had been dismissed by many as an unpromising prince and heir of Durin.  His uncle and elder brother had filled the role so well that he had taken his position as third-in-line as freedom to be nonchalant, and yes, careless, about what might be expected of him.  But still, it rankled when those who had overlooked him before refused to see him any other way, even now.  

“I know I’m not my uncle!” Kíli burst out, surprising himself a little by his own vehemence.  “And I know I’m not my brother.  Believe me, I wish they were both here!”  He took a breath, and continued somewhat more calmly.  “I know I’m not what anyone expected, but let me prove myself.  I want to be a good king!  I’ll take your advice in anything else, and gladly, but this is the one thing I’m sure of:  I love Tauriel, and I want her with me.”

Kíli eyed his cousin steadily, knowing he could not back down if he was to carry his point.  

Daín cleared his throat, and Kíli wondered momentarily if Daín was finding this conversation as awkward as he.  “If you want to be a good king, you have to play the part, give them something to respect,” Daín observed.

“I couldn’t respect a king who lacked the will to act on what he knew was true,” Kíli said softly.  

Daín’s face eased somewhat, and he spoke more gently than he had before.  “Lad, I’m trying to help you.”

“I know,” Kíli acknowledged.  He sighed and dropped the pages to ruffle his fingers through his hair.  “I never thought I’d be king,” he admitted.  “Thorin would be—he was born for it, you know?—and then my brother, who’d have a family by then.  I never imagined myself here!  I know I won’t do this the way they would have, but I have to follow what’s been given to me.” 

He allowed himself a smile then, as he added, “When I set out, I didn’t expect to meet Tauriel, either.  But I can’t deny the way I feel for her, any more than I can undo dragon’s fire.”

Daín smiled unexpectedly.  “You are like your uncle,” he said.

Kíli looked up, surprised.  

“You’re just as stubborn, when it comes to what you believe.”

Kíli was unsure if that was exactly a compliment.  Still, he was pleased.  He, like his brother, had always considered Thorin to be the measure of the man he hoped to become.

Daín continued, stern once more, “If you would have my counsel, an elf is no fitting match for one of Durin’s sons.  Would you divert the eldest bloodline and miss the chance for Durin the Deathless to return again?”

Kíli sighed.  “How is that any different than if I didn’t wed?  Most don’t, anyway,” he said pointedly.  It was true; dwarf women were few, and men married less often than they did not.

“If she were to give you sons, they would still be your heirs.  None would bar them the throne for mixed blood.”

“Then there isn’t a problem.”  The words came out sounding more petulant that Kíli had intended.  

“That _is_ the problem,” Daín returned, just as stubbornly.  “You would supplant the highest of the Dwarven royal lines, and leave us no choice but to honor it.”

Kíli passed a hand over his face.  “So instead, I’m supposed to what?” he said unhappily.  “Pass the throne on to the next in line?  Or refuse to honor my love for Tauriel?”  He knew Daín followed him in succession.  Was that what this was about?  Did Daín really think he’d make such a poor king?

Daín’s expression softened, as if he guessed his younger cousin’s thought.  “Nay, lad, the crown is yours, and I won’t take it from you.  But you must see how much more reasonable it would be for you to choose a wife among your own folk.  Choosing an elf only makes trouble for you.”

How was he supposed to say he was fairly certain he didn’t want anyone, if she was not Tauriel? Kíli wondered.

Daín continued gently, “Would she even marry you?  I’m not saying she doesn’t love you, but her kind live forever.  It may be better for you both to end things here.”

“I haven’t asked if she’ll marry me,” Kíli began, impressed by how calm he sounded, when he felt anything but.  “Yet I’m sure she doesn’t mean to leave me.  Elves are like us; they choose each other for life, and they don’t love a second time.  And I think...  I think there may be no going back for us, after what she did to save me.  You don’t have to understand, but I’m asking you to trust me.  I’m not choosing this on a whim.”

Daín considered Kíli intently for a few moments.  “So be it, lad.  I may not encourage you, but I’ll not oppose you, if your mind is set.  Do you wish to consider it and give me an answer in a day or two?”

Kíli shook his head.  “I’ll be just as sure then.”

“Aye, I thought as much,” Daín noted drily.  “We’ll do our best to help you, lad, you know that, right?  We do want to see you do well as king.”

Kíli nodded.  “Thank you.”

“Just,” Daín added over his shoulder as he left the room.  “You’re on your own with your mum.”  Kíli wasn’t sure, but he thought his cousin was grinning.

* * *

 “You look like you need a drink,” Dwalin had noted later that evening, shoving a foaming tankard towards Kíli, who accepted it gratefully.

“Were you arguing with my Da?” Daín’s daughter, Frey, asked while Kíli took a first long draught.  She had arrived with the most recent party of folk from the Iron Hills, and had easily found friends with Kíli and Ori and others their own age.  She was a pretty lass, with her father’s auburn hair, a lively face, and the full but well-proportioned figure that was considered ideal by dwarven standards.  And she was merry and kind, with a spirit that matched her bright smile.  His brother would have liked her, Kíli thought.

“How’d you guess?” Kíli asked, eyeing her quizzically.  

“Oh, he’s had that antsy feel that he gets when he’s getting ready to tear someone a new one.  You look surprisingly intact.”

Kíli shrugged.  “It wasn’t as bad as I expected, really.  I mean, I think I won.  Sort of.”  

“That’s m’ lad,” Dwalin pronounced, accompanying the words with a clap to the back that nearly had Kíli choking on his ale.  “Don’t let the old boy push you around.  It’s not good for ‘im.  Besides, he’ll like you better for standin’ up to ‘im.”

Frey, too, regarded Kíli with respect.  “I promise he’s all soft inside, when you get to know him, but Da can be, well, downright scary at first.”  She paused, then ventured, “Was it about the elf?”

Kíli flushed.  He didn’t mind what people knew about him and Tauriel, but somehow it was embarrassing to have her ask him.  He suspected Daín may have hoped Kíli would take an interest in his daughter, though thankfully nothing had ever been said about the matter.  Though perhaps that was not so surprising; dwarf women were as strong-willed as the men, and marriages tended to depend on the bride’s choice, rather than any familial arrangement.  

“Right,” Kíli said, covering his embarrassment with another pull at his mug.

“Sorry,” Frey returned kindly.  “It’s not my business.  I just can’t help being curious, that’s all.”  She shrugged.  “I’ve never seen any lady elves before.  I’d like to meet her.”

“I’ll tell ye,” Dwalin interjected.  “They’re all willowy long limbs, starry eyes, and trailin’ hair, which they use to trap unsuspectin’ dwarf lads.”

Frey giggled in spite of herself, and Kíli shot Dwalin an imploring glance.  

“Nah, his Tauriel is all right.  The worst I can say of her is that she fell for this one right here, when she had twelve other fine examples to choose from,” Dwalin thumped his young kinsman fondly on the shoulder, finished his own ale, and rose to leave.

“I think Dwalin would more likely frighten away any elves, ladies or otherwise,” Frey decided, still laughing, after the older dwarf was gone.

Kíli, who had recovered by now, nodded in agreement.  “Well, you’ll make the first dwarf maid Tauriel has met, so if you both don’t embarrass yourselves, you should find each other quite interesting.”

Frey smiled.  “I hope so!”

* * *

 Tauriel was no longer surprised that her parents had received her with so little comment on her love for the dwarf.  If they believed, like Silwen had, that she had pledged her troth and lain with him, then there would have been nothing for them to say that could undo what she had chosen.  They would not have remained silent for long, she was sure, but she imagined that seeing her had been something of a shock.  They had certainly known of her love for Kíli from her actions alone, but even so, they would not have expected to find a visible bond between her and the dwarf prince.  The truth would be no more comforting to them, Tauriel knew, but she could not allow them to believe her relationship to Kíli something it was not.

Tauriel had been grateful when she found both of her parents at home, though now that she stood before them, she felt nervous to learn what they truly thought of her.  Within the pocket of her skirt, she held Kíli’s runestone in one hand; touching the same runes that had once fit into his palm was almost as good as clasping his hand.  

“Silwen told me what you see in my eyes,” she said, meeting her parents’ gazes in turn. “But there is no pledge between Kíli and me, and I have given him only my heart.  Did you think I had...”  Tauriel did not finish the thought, not really wanting to know under what circumstances her parents had imagined she would have offered herself to Kíli.  

“I could not be sure,” Gilfaron said, his voice somewhat strained.  “I supposed that what you did to save his life could have been enough to account for what I saw.  And yet, you must forgive me for wondering, when I knew the uncertainty you both had faced, whether you looked to each other for happiness without heed for the future.”

Tauriel felt her face burning.  It was true that she _had_ acted impulsively in leaving the Greenwood in pursuit of Thorin and his party.  And what her father had guessed was perhaps no more mad than what she had done to save Kíli on Ravenhill, for she had forged some kind of bond to him, in soul, if not in body.  

Gilfaron smiled self-consciously.  “I see I was wrong to think you would have given yourself to him out of despair.”  

“Then it isn’t done,” her mother, Calimîreth, broke in softly.  “You may still let him go.”

Tauriel gazed at her, not sure how correct her.

The elder elf woman approached and took her daughter’s hand.  “You have given Kíli a precious gift, and you need never forget him.  But can you truly be happy with him?”

Tauriel let go of the stone in her pocket and held her mother’s hand in both her own.  “Nana, is that all that troubles you?  My happiness?” Tauriel replied.  “I know it is...unexpected, but I assure you: Kíli does make me happy.”

Calimîreth traced her daughter’s fingers tenderly.  “I see what you feel for him.  I do not doubt he has given you joy.  But will it last?  He is...”  She left the last word unspoken, but still it hung in the air between them.  _Mortal_.  

Tauriel nodded.  “I watched him dying once, and I know I shall have to again, when I am powerless to stop it.  But I believe...”  Her mouth lifted in a wistful smile.  “I believe there are some things worth loving, though we cannot keep them.  Maybe those things are more worth loving than all the rest.”

“Oh, Tauriel, I never would have chosen this for you.”  Tears fell down her cheeks, and she drew her daughter to her.  Tauriel held her tightly.  

“What your mother says is true,” Gilfaron added after the two women had embraced.  “His folk and ours were never meant for each other.  The dwarves were made by a different hand than the first children of Pânadar, and the two are suited to each other in neither body nor mind.”

So, he thought Kíli was not good enough for her.  Tauriel sighed.  “It is true: we are different in many ways.  But not in all.  Kíli has given me something beautiful: with him, I feel part of something greater than I ever hoped for.  I am not sorry I fell in love with him.”

“Then love him.  But do so in your memory, were he shall remain unfading, the valiant young prince whose life you gave back to him,” her father said gently.  “Keep him as an image in your heart, and it will not matter that he is a dwarf: he shall never lose what you saw in him.”

“Father, I cannot love an image,” she said, with a gently ironic smile.  “You must know that.”

“You would rather have a dwarf,” he returned, his words resigned and disbelieving.  

“I would.”  Her father, she realized, could not imagine her happily matched with one who, to him, must seem so graceless in manner and appearance.  “You are wrong if you suppose I could love him better if I could think of him as a beautiful yet distant figure, like some elven lord from a ballad.  He is beautiful just as he is.”

“Tauriel,” Gilfaron sighed, clearly restraining himself from arguing with her.  “Consider, before you make a choice you cannot change, what it is you truly want, and what he can and cannot give you.”

“I promise,” she breathed, and bowed her head to let him kiss her brow.  While not the blessing she wished for, his patience and hope would have to be enough for now.  

* * *

 Yet Tauriel found unexpected support in her grandmother.  A woman from one of the elder generations in the Greenwood, she remembered the forest when it truly had been green, and Thranduil’s father had established his rule there.  She had lost her husband in the Battle of Dagorlad, though not before bearing Tauriel’s mother.  

“You know that your grandfather died not many years after we were wed,” she had reminded Tauriel during one of their visits.  “But I do not regret my choice.  Nor would I trade the years I spent with him for a lifetime with another fated to live longer.”

Tauriel smiled.  Her grandmother had been a happy woman, as far back as she could remember.  And her husband’s loss, rather than embittering her, had only seemed to increase her joy in those she loved who surrounded her.

The elder woman continued, “And we had fewer years than you may hope to share with young Kíli.  I find nothing to fault in your choice to follow the one you love.  As for his being one of Durin’s folk, his is an ancient line of kings, and if that isn’t good enough for you, then not even our prince deserves you.”  

“Thank you, Grandmum,” Tauriel had said with a laugh, though she brushed something from her eyes.  “I would have _Nana_ and _Ada_   see that, as well.”  

“They’ll know because you are happy.  Now, are you going to tell me about him?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My interpretation of Dain is based rather more on the description of him in Appendix A as "a great and wise king" under whom Erebor prospered than Gandalf's comment in the third film that Dain is even less reasonable than Thorin!
> 
>  _Pânadar_ is my best rendering of "All-father" (Iluvatar) into Sindarin. If anyone had a better translation, let me know!
> 
> What bothers Tauriel is not the idea that her parents, like Silwen, think she secretly married Kili by invoking Iluvatar's name, as even an informal elven marriage would require. Rather, she is worried they might think she didn't even marry him, but that she simply gave in to an impulse and had sex with him. She figures that they already thing she's crazy for caring for a dwarf, so they might just assume she would also do something like that, despite the fact that (according to Tolkien) elves don't usually act on their passions that way.


	6. Chapter 6

Dís, had arrived in March with others of her clan.  Kíli had been with the first to greet them outside the gates to the mountain.  When he spotted his mother, he ran to meet her, and she dropped her bundle to throw her arms round him.  “Oh, Kí, my darling,” she said, her voice somewhere between joy and sadness.  Kíli had held his mother tightly as she wept into his shoulder, not caring that his neighbors and kin saw him sharing in her tears.  

When she had dried her eyes, she took his face in her hands and held it for a moment.  “It’s enough that I got you back,” she said softly and kissed him.

“Mum, not in front of everyone,” he protested half-heartedly, before shouldering her bundle and joining the others who were already entering the gate.  

Later that night, he accompanied her to the tomb of his brother and uncle.   He stood beside her, hands on her shoulders as she knelt before the imposing stone tombs.  Kíli had become familiar with his own grief by now, but watching his mother’s sorrow, feeling her tremble as she wept, had been a new pain for him.  He would not allow himself to imagine what she would have felt, had his made the third tomb in the family vault.  Tauriel’s gift had blessed others beyond himself, a fact for which he silently thanked the gods.

Her farewells said, Dís had set aside her grief and turned her attention fully to her remaining son.  Back in her quarters, she had asked after his injures, and Kíli had recounted his recovery in detail and shown her the scar on his ribs that was quite cleanly healed by now, knowing such was the surest way to satisfy her and head off future inquiries.  

“Well, you can give me back your token,” she said then.  “You’ve proved your word, and you needn’t carry it for me now.”

Kíli flushed slightly.  “Um.  I don’t have it any more,” he said, focusing intently on doing up the last few fastenings on his tunic.  

“Oh?” Dís noted, her tone inquisitive but neutral.

Kíli looked up at her and continued, “I gave it to someone.”

“I’ve heard about the elf,” his mother said, and a hint of amusement showed in her eyes.  “I was wondering when you were going to say something about her.”

“Her name is Tauriel,” he said, taking courage from her look.  “I’ve never met anyone like her before.  I love her.”

“And she loves you,” Dís remarked gently.

Kíli nodded.  “She nearly gave up her life to save mine, after the battle.”

“It’s not what I’d have expected from an elf, and one of Thranduil’s folk at that, but maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.”  She smiled at her son fondly.  

Kíli quirked a puzzled brow at her.  

“All I’m saying is, you’re a good lad, and if your Tauriel is clear-sighted, she’ll see that, elf or no.”  She chuckled.  “To think I’d be grateful to hear of an elf using her magic on you.  I never dreamed it, or my list of worries’d have been twice as long!”  

Kíli grinned.  He liked thinking of Tauriel as something of a sorceress, though he knew that what seemed magic was more truly the grace and knowledge of her elven race.  

“I knew this would come of letting you go off into the world with your head full of adventures,” Dis scolded him fondly.  “Look at you!”  She paused, thoughtful.  “What was it she did, when she saved you?  I’ve known better than to believe half the things people say.”

“Well, the first time, when she cured my wound, I think she prayed over me.  I could feel her words drive away the pain and darkness and fear.  And the second time...”  He hesitated, reluctant to describe it, even to her.  “Her soul, it reached out to mine.  I was almost gone, and then she was there, holding on to me.”  It felt like far too intimate a thing to put into words.

Dís made a thoughtful sound and gazed at him in silence for a while.  At last, she said, “For all their strange ways, I suppose the elves are, at bottom, good folk.”

Kíli peered at her in surprise.

She smiled gently at him.  “Of course, they may be stubborn and wrong, like any of us.  But Tauriel proves they know goodness and love, as well.”

Her son smiled at her, pleased.  Dís caught him about the shoulders and drew him to her.  “Kíli, I love you, and I’m proud of you.”

“I love you, too, Mum,” he said, returning her embrace.  He kissed her cheek, and she mussed his hair.

“And here I thought maybe you’d start doing something with that unruly mane of yours at last, with a girl to impress!”

“Mum!” he protested.  

* * *

 Kíli valued his his mother’s acceptance of Tauriel, for he knew it was not without its own cost.  Coming to visit her a few days after her arrival, Kíli had found her speaking with Daín.  When he realized they were talking about him, he had paused, listening, outside the door, unwilling to enter and yet too curious to leave.

“You shouldn’t favor him so,” his cousin insisted.

“Favor him?  How is it I’m favoring him?”  Dís’s voice was incredulous.  “It’s his decision if he wants an elf.  I know it won’t be the easiest for him, but I can’t make his choices.  He’s grown now.”

“I know, Dís, and I respect that.  But he listens to you!  Can’t you convince him of the duty he owes his lineage?”  There was a pause, and then Daín continued in a thoroughly flustered voice, “He’s of the eldest noble bloodline of our people and he’s going to trade it all away on an elf?  And you don’t care?  I know you once took more pride in your family than that,” he added in an almost beseeching tone that Kíli would have found amusing, had the topic been different.  

Dís snorted.  “Oh, I know our place all too well, and what it has cost us.  My son is all I have left!  The only reason he’s not lying down in that vault beside his brother is that Tauriel loves him.  The way I see it, he can act on that love as he wishes.  I can’t bring myself to fault her just for being an elf.”  There was a pause, then she continued.  “Of course it would be less trouble for us all if he were to choose one of our own folk.  But can I say it would be better?  I, of all people, have learned the future is never certain.”

Kíli left then; he had heard enough.  He was oddly grateful, he realized, to find that his mother did not support him blindly and that she accepted Tauriel as much for what the elf had proven as for the fact that Kíli loved her. 

* * *

Spring was drawing on, bringing with it Tauriel’s promised return to Erebor for Kíli’s coronation.  With Thranduil’s sanction, she prepared to lead an emissary party to express the goodwill of the Greenwood and its king upon the return of a king under the mountain.  She had picked an escort of half a dozen other elves, including her friend Silwen, as well as chosen gifts appropriate to the occasion.  In addition to a fine selection of spirits to contribute to the celebrations (not the least of which was the spiced mead she had promised Dori) and other fine things from the palace’s well-provided larders, Tauriel had gathered the gear and weapons confiscated from the dwarves during their imprisonment.  It was perhaps a little embarrassing to have to return such belongings, but she had seen to it that clothing and gear had been repaired.  She had even added a number of small items that she knew would be appreciated: an enameled clockwork bird for Bifur, a beautifully bound notebook for Ori, a carved silver saltbox for Bombur, a dyed leather tobacco pouch for Bofur, and so on, for the rest of them.  She was saddened to be able to add nothing for Thorin or his elder nephew, but she was sure their kin would be grateful to receive their effects nonetheless.

Tauriel wished she was not leaving just as her home forest was waking from winter at last, the fresh green buds adding a mist of color to dark branches.  Yet returning to Kíli, supporting him as he accepted his crown and new duties, made up for missing one of her favorite times of year.  Besides, she had already begun planning to replant the forests that had once covered the shoulders of Erebor.  Spring would soon be as beautiful on the mountain as it was in the Greenwood, perhaps more so.  

Her parents did not oppose her going.  Tauriel’s role as envoy was an honor, and moreover, they knew she must work out for herself what Kíli must be to her.  As little as either wanted to see her with him, both understood that forcing their will on her might well result in losing a place in the new life she might chose.  Her father’s only instructions had been that Kíli woo her as custom and courtesy demanded.  “I wouldn’t care if he were Durin Reborn, himself: he cannot expect to gain you on the merit of his crown alone.  If I am to give my daughter to a dwarf, it will be because he has endeavored to deserve her.”  Tauriel had swallowed her frustration at his _endeavored_ , and promised that Kíli’s dwarven honor would allow for no less.  

Her farewell to Legolas had been bittersweet.  As much as the two of them had acted with their usual camaraderie since her return, something was lacking from their old, comfortable familiarity.  Tauriel missed the friendly intimacy that had grown up between them since Legolas had first taken a liking to the promising, if impetuous, young captain who had been assigned her first command under him in the Greenwood’s guard.  At times, Tauriel found herself almost angry that he had fallen in love with her and forced everything to change. She had to remind herself that even as a friend, Legolas could well have taken an objection to her love for Kíli.  And in the end, she did not want to be angry, either at Legolas or because of him.  

* * *

At the end of her last patrol, the two of them had lingered outside the fortress gate after the others of their party had gone in.  It was early morning, and the eastern sky was already showing rust and gold between the silhouetted branches of the trees.  Erebor was barely visible as a dark shape along the horizon.

“I thought I’d know what to say to you by now,” Legolas said, looking towards the sunrise, Tauriel’s own destination in a few days.  “I once believed I understood what you wanted, but I find I no longer do.”  He glanced to her, his eyes unreadable.  

Tauriel took a breath to speak, but could find no words.  

“I cannot pretend I would not rather keep you here.”  His voice—just this once—betrayed the deep unhappiness she knew he felt.  When he continued, his tone was apologetic, self-deprecatory.  “It’s selfish; I know!  Perhaps I need to learn I cannot always have what I want.”

“I’m afraid I’ve forced you to learn that lesson many a time already,” Tauriel admitted, half teasing.

Legolas smiled briefly, remembering it was true.

She wanted to embrace him, touch him, offer some kind of consolation, but was afraid such tenderness might only hurt, coming from her.  “Legolas, I know how you feel, and I wish...”  She sighed.  What did she wish, that she could love him?  No.  “I wish I did not have to disappoint you.”

“I know,” he said gently.  “And I will try not to disappoint you.”  He laid a hand on her shoulder.  “Please know, however it may seem, that I do want you to be happy.”  

Tauriel took his hand and held it to her cheek.  “Thank you,” she breathed.  

And then, because she knew it was the right thing, she threw her arms round him.  It was an impulsive action for an elf, perhaps one she had learned from her time spent among mortals.  Elves, with their long lifespans, did not feel the same urgency to express their emotions as humans or even dwarves did.  Yet she had discovered how important it was to show her feelings for those she loved.  

After a moment, Legolas carefully placed his arms round her and lightly kissed her brow.  As he let her go, Tauriel thought he whispered, “Farewell.”


	7. Chapter 7

This wasn’t the welcome she had expected, Tauriel thought as she watched the plain that lay between them and the mountain.  Erebor was yet distant, but she could make out a troop of dwarves marching in formation down the valley towards them.  Sunlight glinted off mail and weapons.  

“Something is wrong,” she noted to the mounted elf beside her.  “I’m going to ride ahead.  Hold your pace behind me.”

“Tauriel?” Silwen called behind her, but Tauriel’s horse had already broken away in a canter.  

As she drew nearer, she could make out Daín, astride his improbable boar, at the head of maybe fifty dwarves on foot and armed for battle.  They did not change their direction nor speed as she approached.  

“Lord Daín,” she called, reining in her horse when she was near enough to hail him.  

“My lady Tauriel,” he returned, directing his steed towards her at last.

“Surely you do not ride forth on our account,” she noted, drawing alongside him.  

“No, my lady,” he agreed.  “We’re to find Prince Kíli and escort him home.”

“What—?  Is Kíli missing?” she managed.  She had expected some kind of trouble, but not to find the dwarf prince at the center of it.

“He and an envoy rode to Dale two nights past.  They were to return yesterday, but never came.  We got news by raven last night that they were seen outside one of the great worm tunnels.  The birds swept the hills this morning and there’s no sign of ‘em now.”

“And there has been no other word?” Tauriel queried.

“We guess they must’ve trailed the orcs back down the tunnel.  We’d closed them up as best we could after the battle, but it’s no surprise the last orc stragglers are tryin’ to get through.  None of the birds would dare go in there,” Daín said tersely.  

Tauriel glanced across the plain to the great wounds in the mountain’s side.  What might still lurk in those passages?  She didn’t want to know.  But if Kíli were down there...

“I’ll come with you,” she told Daín.  

 He chuckled drily.  “Well, I won’t turn you away.  I’d say it weren’t a place for you, but I’m not sure you’d know,” he said, and Tauriel was fairly sure it was a joke.  “Kíli might not thank me for bringing you, but he can tell us both when we see him.”  Daín had rather pointedly not said _if_ , she noted.  

“He’s alive,” she said assuredly, almost surprising herself.  

“Better be, or you can bring him back again so I can kill ‘im just for worrying us,” Daín said gruffly.

“No, I’m sure,” Tauriel said again.

Daín glanced up at her, surprised.  “What, is this more of your elf magic?”

“I— I suppose,” she stammered, not sure how to explain it herself.  “I think I would have felt it if...  If he weren’t.”  Since she had returned home, Tauriel had been pondering the nature of the bond she had formed with Kíli when she had saved him.  She still did not fully understand, but in that one moment when she had been ready to believe Daín’s unspoken fear that he might be dead, she had glimpsed what his passing would have cost her and been equally sure he was safe.  

Daín shrugged, an impressive feat considering his armor and his unconventional steed.  “I don’t care how you know, s’long as you’re right.”

“Let me tell my party, and I’ll be back at your side,” Tauriel promised, and whirled away in a flurry of flying hooves and red hair.

* * *

Though all of her escort were trained warriors, Tauriel had only permitted Voronwë and Silwen to join her.  Both were trusted comrades from the guard, and she knew she could rely on them to follow her lead.  Silwen, she was fairly certain, would have insisted on coming, had Tauriel requested her or not.  

Tauriel and her companions rejoined Daín’s party just as they reached the mouth of the furthest worm tunnel.  Dismounting, she came to his side as he surveyed the boulder-strewn entrance.  Though the tunnel had been choked with rock, there was a rough pathway, wide enough for several to stand abreast, cleared through the rubble.  The way was too stony to reveal any footprints.

“As I thought,” Daín pronounced dourly.  “Orcs must’ve been trying to get back through.  You, watch the entrance,” he said, indicating a division of his men.  “The rest, come with me.”  He drew his axe from his belt, and continued down the path through the stones.

Tauriel readied her own daggers amidst a general hissing of drawn blades.  She and Silwen fell into step among the file of warriors following Daín.  

This tunnel, which had been wide enough at first, narrowed as it wound back into the mountainside, often becoming so low and tight that Tauriel had to stoop and scramble awkwardly among the stones.  She could hear Daín a few paces ahead of her, muttering angrily; though the words were dwarvish, she supposed he was imprecating the idiocy that led his nephew and his escort into such a poor tactical position.  Daín’s voice broke off, mid-harangue, but before Tauriel could guess why, she had emerged from the narrow entrance passage to stand behind him in an open cavern.

The whole place stank of orc, and small wonder, since the lantern at Daín’s belt revealed the corpses of perhaps a dozen of them piled against one wall of the tunnel.  There seemed to have been a fight here, given the dark stains on the tunnel floor that must have been blood, but before Tauriel could judge more, from behind and slightly above her, came a familiar voice shouting her name.  

She spun round to find Kíli perched on a boulder overlooking the entrance, his bow in hand, though unbent.  Around him, and at either side of the entrance, were the warriors of his escort, weapons drawn. 

“Kíli!” Tauriel cried as he scrambled down to the cavern floor before her.  By now, more of Daín’s party, along with Silwen and Voronwë, had trailed into the open and were gazing back in surprise at the friendly ambush.  

“I knew it had to be you when I heard you cursing me,” Kíli was saying to his cousin, “Though I didn’t expect you to bring elvish reinforcements.”  

“And what were we supposed to do, with you gone missing?” Daín growled, though even Tauriel could see he was pleased to see his young kinsman.

Kíli’s face sobered.  “I’m sorry to have worried you.  If there had been a way to send you word, I would have.”  

He went on to explain that during their visit to Dale, they had learned huntsmen had spotted a few roving orcs in the foothills.  The orcs had proven no great danger yet, though it was prudent to find their lair and root them out while they were still few.  Kíli had suggested searching the worm tunnels, which, though they had been blocked, might still afford both shelter and passage for stragglers and rogues.  

On their return to the mountain, the dwarven envoy had investigated the tunnels and found the passage, which seemed recently cleared.  It was already late evening, and they had concealed themselves on the hillside above to watch as night fell.  Shortly after dark, a party of four orcs had exited the cave.  The dwarves had waited several hours to ensure the scouting party was beyond return, and had entered the cave, judging correctly by both the Dale men’s reports and the size of the scouting party, that the remaining numbers could not be many more than they had already seen.  The orcs had posted no guard, presumably trusting their safety to the narrow, hidden entrance.  It had been quick work for Kíli and his men to dispatch the half dozen orcs that had remained behind.  They had remained in the cave overnight, successfully ambushing the returning orc party shortly before dawn.   They had taken the leader of the scouting party prisoner, intending to interrogate him, but before leaving the cave, Kíli had wanted to investigate the tunnels further, which they had done.  While they had found some bones and debris, nothing seemed to suggest any activity since the battle last winter.  Daín’s party had arrived just as they were on the point of exiting the cave, and they had prepared for a fight, if necessary.

“Your choices were sound enough,” Daín responded grudgingly, “With the exception of not thinking to worry us with the disappearance of the crown prince a fortnight before your coronation.”

Kíli sighed, clearly exasperated.  “It was one night,” he said levelly.  “I know I’m young, but I’m not so much of a fool to get myself killed.”  

Daín bit back a reply.  Kíli glanced at Tauriel, afraid to find disapproval on her face as well, but he relaxed as he found her expression sympathetic. She knew that many had judged him too young and inexperienced to be a responsible leader yet.  Remembering her own days as a young lieutenant yet to prove herself, Tauriel was inclined to be supportive, not judgmental.  She said nothing, not wanting to undermine Kíli’s credibility by suggesting he looked more to the approval of an elf than one of his own kin, but she smiled warmly at him.  He smiled back, a look which Daín, from his mildly amused snort, still clearly noticed.

* * *

 Once they had emerged from the cave entrance, the dwarves began swiftly closing the passage into the tunnels.  Tauriel stood aside with her elven companions while Kíli and Daín questioned the orc prisoner.  She remembered the last interrogation she had helped carry out as a captain in the Greenwood.  Then, surely aware of his inevitable fate and hoping to deal one last desperate insult, their prisoner had boasted of the poisoned wound dealt to one of the escaping dwarves.  The orc’s gibe had been more successful than even he could have guessed, for Tauriel had recognized he spoke of Kíli.  She had not wanted to examine the significance of the way her heart had dropped in her chest when she realized the engaging young man she had spoken with just hours before had been sentenced to die.  Though Tauriel had not admitted so to herself at the time, she knew now that her mind had already been made to follow Kíli when she had stormed from the room without asking leave of either king or prince.

Now, watching Kíli’s grim face as he endured a string of orcish insults, Tauriel found herself unexpectedly grateful for the spite of that former orc.  The words he had spoken out of malice had given her the chance to save a life that had come to matter so much to her.  Moments of such wonderful, unexpected good in their lives made her feel she was meant to be at Kíli’s side.  Finding Bofur in Laketown with a bunch of athelas in his hands had been another such moment.  She was sure that those beautiful coincidences could not be called chance.

When it was clear the orc would offer no more information, he had been released.  It was apparent he had no allies in the area, and if he were captured again, he could not expect to receive the same mercy.  His small band had been the remnant of deserters and survivors who had fled down the River Running and now returned, planning to make their way back to the fortress of Gundabad in the north.  They had lingered here in the hopes of taking some easy plunder from the men of Dale, but the city—though not fully rebuilt—had proven too well defended.  

When they turned homewards at last, the dwarves had fallen back into marching order with Daín and Kíli at their head.  Tauriel, leading her horse, accepted a place walking at Kíli’s side.  With Daín opposite them and the company at their backs, their conversation was limited to more general topics than it might otherwise have been, but Tauriel described the Greenwood as she had left it, budding forth with new growth, and she told of her journey to Erebor.  In return, Kíli had told her of the coronation preparations, as well as the expansion and repairs that had been continued in her absence.  

The dwarves covered ground quickly, even on foot, and they soon passed under the gate to the mountain.  They had a busy, eager reception, and while Tauriel supposed this was partially due to the increased numbers in Erebor since she had left, she wondered how much real concern was caused by Kíli’s overdue return.

As a squire took her horse and lead it, with Silwen’s own steed and Daín’s boar, towards the stables, Tauriel turned to Kíli.  

“ _Mae govannen._ Returning to you is indeed a fair meeting,” she said, the warmth of her tone revealing the affection beneath her formal words.  She leaned down to kiss his dirty face.  Before she could straighten, Kíli caught her and drew her back to his lips, and Tauriel surprised herself by lingering over the kiss a moment longer than she had intended in the eyes of so many.

He grinned as he let her go.  “It’s good to have you back.”

Tauriel made no effort to restrain her answering smile as she and Silwen turned to follow Balin, who lead the two elves out of the entrance hall to rejoin the rest of their party, which had arrived several hours earlier. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, apparently those worms were the "wild were-wyrms of the east" which Bilbo mentions in chapter 1 of the book. I think Tolkien was _probably_ meaning some kind of dragon rather than the sandworms of Arrakis. Who knows; maybe Erebor's new spice mining operation is going to place them in control of the universe. Haha, good grief. Now there's a crossover that doesn't need to happen.


	8. Chapter 8

Back in her old rooms after seeing that her companions had already been welcomed and settled, Tauriel wondered at the changes that had been made while she was gone.  In the outer receiving room, there was a proper elf-sized chair with a side table, plus a shelf of books, some of which were written in Khuzdul—was Kíli hoping to teach her?  The shelf also held an enameled teapot and some canisters that probably once had contained tobacco, but which would serve equally well for her tea (of which she had brought an ample supply from the Greenwood).  The walls had been decorated anew with tapestries and the floor covered with a plush rug in a geometric pattern which Tauriel realized was meant to depict a meadow starred with small, colorful flowers.  A number of hanging lamps, intricately made of gems and colored glass, filled the room with a warm, living light.  As she passed, they swayed slightly and created a dance of light and shadows that made her think of sunlight beneath the trees.

In the bedchamber beyond, greatly to her delight, she found a new, much larger bed.  She would no longer have to sleep with her feet hanging off onto a second mattress!  Tauriel guessed it had been made especially for her, since the frame was decorated by a simple, graceful carving of leaves, a motif she felt fairly certain was not a typical dwarvish one.  She laughed when she saw that the coverlet was sewn with little silver stars on a midnight field—Kíli had obviously overseen these new furnishings.

Tauriel unpacked her traveling chest into the stone wardrobe, grateful that she actually had clothes enough to fill it this time.  As she carried her comb and some toiletries into the adjoining washroom, she stopped short at the sight of the most unexpected alteration of all: a large copper bathtub in the center of the floor.  She gave a small squeak of delight, and quickly depositing her things, went to investigate this new addition.  

There had been a smaller stone washtub in one corner before, but she had never used it, since heating and plumbing had not yet been restored to functionality.  But now—  She held her breath and turned a tap.  After a few moments, a stream of steaming water poured into the tub. She had heard of such wonders, of course, but even the Elvenking did not have craftsmen skilled enough to supply his palace with heated and running water.  

 Her eyes fell on the towels stacked neatly on a shelf beside the washstand.  Yes, there was certainly time for a bath before she was expected for dinner.  

* * *

 Tauriel was perched on the stool at the dressing table, plaiting her hair, when she heard a knock at the outer door to her receiving room.

“Who’s there?” she called, unable to do more with her fingers full of braids.

“It’s me. It’s Kíli.”

“I can’t get the door, but please come in,” she returned.

The far door opened, and after a few moments, Kíli cautiously peered round the door to her bedchamber. A smile broke across his face as he saw her.

“Sorry, my hands were full,” she explained as she joined the two braids that wound back behind either ear and deftly bound them into a single strand.

“I came to escort you to dinner,” he said as he joined her.

“I’ll be ready in a moment.”

Kíli watched her long, graceful fingers weave together the copper strands. When she finished the plait, she held it with one hand and caught a thin leather cord from her lap with the other.

“Wait,” Kíli interrupted her before she bound off the braid. Tauriel watched him curiously as he opened a small casket at one end of the dressing table, and returned with something she could not see in his palm.  

“May I?” he asked, gesturing to her braid. She passed it to him, and their fingers overlapped for a moment as he took care not to drop the woven strands. Then he did something swift and clever with whatever he had been holding in his other hand. When he passed the braid back to her, she saw it was held fast by an ornamental silver bead, like those she had seen in many of the other dwarves’ hair and beards.  

“There are some matching ear cuffs and things in the box. I thought you might like them.”

Tauriel looked back up from the jewelry to his face. “Thank you; I do!”

He smiled, pleased.

“And thank you, also, for all the things you've done to my rooms while I was gone.” She gestured about herself. “I feel...at home.”

“I’m glad. I want you to be happy here.”

“I am.”

His answering look told her what she already knew: that her being there made him happy.

Kíli took her hands and drew her to her feet. His hold on her was strong and sturdy, and the motion felt entirely natural, despite the fact that she was taller than he. Once she stood, Kíli stepped back to look at her. Tauriel knew this was the first time he had seen her wearing anything other than her ranger’s attire, and she enjoyed the way his admiring gaze swept over her.

She had chosen a gown of moss colored velvet that swept to the floor in a smooth, slender line.  Hints of a rich auburn-colored underdress showed behind the lacing on sleeves and bodice and through the slit up one side of the skirt, which was hemmed slightly higher at the front to show off a pair of low boots in a soft, golden suede.  Kíli found that what had struck him before as a warrior’s grace was now apparent as a softer, feminine loveliness that was no less strong for being gentle.  

“You look like an autumn day,” he breathed and she answered him with a heartfelt smile of pleasure.  

As they left her rooms to collect the rest of her elven escort, Kíli tucked Tauriel’s arm in his.  “My mum will be at dinner; you’ll get to meet her,” he said as they walked.

Her touch must have betrayed her nervousness, because he laughed.

“Don’t worry,” Kíli assured her.  “She’ll like you.”

* * *

Tauriel had never seen the grand dining hall this crowded before.  Every table was full, including those on the dais at the head of the hall, which she had never seen in use before.  With the approaching coronation, manners seemed to have become much more formal than they had been before.  She wondered if it all made Kíli uncomfortable.  

The elven envoy had been given a place of honor below the royal table, and Tauriel already knew most of the dwarves who would be sitting with them.  Yet before they were seated, Kíli led Tauriel to the dais, where a middle-aged dwarf woman descended to meet them.  

“My mother, the Lady Dís,” Kíli said, presenting Tauriel.

 She was beautiful, Tauriel thought. Even the oddness of seeing a woman with hair on her face could not make Tauriel miss that.  Dis had the same dark locks as Kíli, though touched now with grey, and the shape of her eyes and the sweep of her brows were the pattern of his.  She carried herself with the unconscious dignity that Tauriel remembered Thorin had managed even as the elven guards had shoved him unceremoniously into his cell in the Elvenking’s dungeons, and Tauriel was sure this woman’s natural poise and grace must have marked her as a princess even during years in exile.  

 Standing before Dís, Tauriel suddenly felt unsure of how to behave.  On the one hand, Tauriel was the ambassador from the King of the Greenwood greeting a princess of Durin’s house, and she did not wish to breach custom or good manners by over-familiarity.  Yet at the same time, this was the mother of the man she loved, and Tauriel was equally afraid to appear haughty and cold, since she knew the reserve of her folk was often interpreted thus by those who were unfamiliar with elvish manners.  

In the end, she took her cue from Dís, who bowed graciously and addressed her, “Welcome, Tauriel of the Greenwood.”

Tauriel curtseyed.  “I am honored, and I thank you for the hospitality of Erebor.”

The softness to the dwarf woman’s eyes gave Tauriel hope that Dís saw beyond the formality of the occasion when she gazed on the young elf.  Tauriel smiled then, recognizing the expression she knew from Kíli’s own looks.

“It has been long since one of your fair folk has stood in these halls.  You honor us, as well,” Dís said warmly.

“I thank you.  And you must thank your son.”  Tauriel looked to Kíli as she finished.

“Aye, he is a rare one,” Dís agreed, smiling.

Kíli flushed.  “If I’d though you two were going to embarrass me—”  His words did not hide that he was still clearly pleased with each of them.

Tauriel saw the love and pride in Dis’s eyes as she regarded her son.  “And you need to stop being embarrassed by the truth,” she teased affectionately.  Then she nodded her respect to Tauriel and turned back to her seat while Kíli handed Tauriel to hers.  

“See, I told you,” he confirmed as he adjusted her chair.

“I believed you!”

Kíli leaned near her and whispered against her ear, “I have a surprise for you later,” and Tauriel smiled softly to herself as he left.

* * *

She was enjoying the dinner very much.  Tauriel had been able to greet old friends and introduce them to the members of her envoy.  The other elves seemed somewhat uncomfortable at first, though slowly they warmed to the courtesy shown by their dwarven hosts.  Tauriel tried not to smile as she watched Bifur earnestly trying to communicate something to Silwen, who was seated beside him.  Silwen smiled politely and listened attentively to his stream of Khuzdul, not a word of which she understood, while a fondly long-suffering Bofur interposed the occasional translation when he could.  Even Voronwë, who was habitually somewhat reserved, had seemed to find a common topic of interest with the dwarf seated across from him, as they discussed the relative merits of dual and single weapons techniques.  

Tauriel had missed these busy halls with their merry gatherings.  It was not that the elves did not take equal joy in shared company, but the energy was somehow different, not as noisy nor so spontaneous.  She enjoyed the immediacy of the dwarves’ happiness.

Throughout the meal, Tauriel found her eyes straying to Kíli at the high table.  He looked very much a prince in his fine clothes, sitting tall among his royal kindred.  He did not have the quiet sternness that she was used to in her own king—and which Prince Legolas could match when he wished—but Tauriel felt that Kíli’s lively and earnest spirit could command as much love as such solemn reserve, perhaps more.  He would make a good king, as those who doubted would see in time.

Kíli caught her watching him more than once, the edge of his mouth lifting in an unconscious grin when he met her eyes.  Once he had even winked at her, and she had laughed into her goblet and nearly upset her wine.  She had not flirted with anyone in a very long time, Tauriel realized.  She enjoyed the way her heart faltered when Kíli looked at her, even across this crowded hall.  Perhaps the woman she had once been would have tried to conceal her feelings before the eyes of so many, yet she did not think she wanted to now.  She was happy, and she would let Kíli—and whoever else willed—know. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I blame the idea of bathtubs and running water in fantasyland on the _Obsidian Trilogy_ by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory. It made sense in that high fantasy world, and it seems to me that dwarves could very well have devised such technology. They seem like a folk who would appreciate comfort, particularly if said comfort can be the occasion for elaborate and ingenious craftsmanship.


	9. Chapter 9

Kíli held Tauriel’s hand as he drew her up a narrow stair.

“Have you guessed where we are yet?” he asked.  She sensed, more than saw him, in the unlit passage, but from his voice, she knew he was smiling.

“At first, I thought you were leading me to the armory, though I see now you weren’t planning on making me a present of a battle axe.”

He snorted.  “You would be terrifying wielding a great two-handed axe like they do down in the west.  Maybe I _should_ give you one.”

“You want me to be terrifying?”

“Just to your enemies.”

After a few more moments, Tauriel continued, “This must be the way to the secret back door.”  She, of course, had heard the tale of how Thorin and his band, led by their expert burglar, had sneaked down the hidden back stair and into the dragon’s lair.

“Aye, and though everyone knows about it, it’s still supposed to be secret, so don’t be telling I brought you up here.”

He stopped, having reached the top of the stair.

“I won’t,” Tauriel said as she came up close behind him.  Though she knew perfectly well where he was even in the dark, she still pressed a hand to his back.  

“Indeed,” he answered teasingly over his shoulder.

Kíli placed his hands against the smooth, square end of the passage and pushed firmly.  There was the solid sound of grating stone, and then a line of pale silver light spread into the shape of a doorway.  Taking Tauriel’s hand once more, Kíli drew her onto the open mountainside.  

Tauriel caught her breath as they stepped out under the sky.  She had never been so high on the mountain before, and it felt to her as if she truly stood amongst the stars.

“Kíli, it’s— _Bain_.  Beautiful,” she translated.  

“I knew you’d like it.  More than a battle axe, anyway.”

The evening was mild, with a warm breeze that smelled of green and growing things.  Tauriel breathed deeply as she gazed out over the valley beneath them.  There to the west was Ravenhill.  Seen at night and from above, it did not look the same place where she had lain, heart breaking, over Kíli’s still body and prayed that he live.

“Death cannot hold sway here forever,” she told him.  “The world is coming alive once more.  Can you smell it?”

She felt him breathe beside her.  “Yes.  It reminds me of you.”  

Tauriel laughed.  “And speaking of mending, how are your ribs?”

“Much better.”  He grinned.  “I’ve stopped avoiding Dwalin.  I don’t think he understands the difference between expressing affection and crushing bones.”

Tauriel stifled a giggle.  “I’m sorry!”

“Nah, s’pretty funny, as long as you’re not his victim.”

“I still wonder at how quickly you’ve healed,” she mused.  “Not even an elf would have overcome your injuries so soon.”

“That’s dwarves for you,” he said proudly.  “We don’t break easily.”

“No, you do not.”  

There was a short ledge on the mountain shoulder which formed a natural bench, and they moved towards it. 

“That was what surprised me when I first saw you,” Kíli continued once they were seated.  “You looked so slender and, well, _delicate_.  For a moment, I thought you were mad, trying to stand between us and those spiders.  You’d be killed!  And then you slew them, as easily as any dwarf warrior.”

Tauriel chuckled.  “Is that when you fell in love with me?  When I was killing spiders?”

“More or less,” he confessed.  “I’d never seen anyone so strong and yet so lovely.”

“Surely your dwarf women fight as warriors alongside the men,” Tauriel protested in surprise.  

“Yes, but...”  He shrugged.  “They’re as solid as any of us, and beautiful for it.  You’re so slim and graceful—next to us dwarves, you should be fragile.  But you’re strong and keen as a blade.”  He looked down at her slender hand in his broad, sturdy one.  “I remember the first time I touched you: when you gave back my runestone, my fingers felt so rough and clumsy next to yours.”

“Kíli, you didn’t drop your stone on purpose, did you?” Tauriel accused, surprised at herself for not guessing it sooner. 

“No.  Yes.  I don’t know.”  He shook his head.  “But I do know it was your hands that gave me hope that you might love me,” he continued.

“Oh?” she murmured.

“You never pulled them away when I touched you.”

“No.  I did not know what I wanted, then, but I did not mind your hands.”  She brushed her thumb against his calloused palm.  “They’re not clumsy.  And roughness may also be beautiful, when it is sure and strong.”

He drew her hand to his lips, and she laughed at the prick of his beard.

“I’m sorry if I worried you today,” Kíli said as he placed her hand back in her lap.

“You did not,” Tauriel said.  “I knew you lived.”

“Oh? How?” Kíli urged.  

“I should have guessed at this before, but I didn’t begin to understand till I went home: Kíli, when I reached out to your _fae_ with mine, we made a bond between us.”

He nodded.  “I know.”  She regarded him with surprise, so Kíli went on.  “I know what you did was no light thing.  And since then, I’ve felt...  Well, I don’t think I could ever love anyone but you.  You’ve touched my soul.”

Tauriel smiled.  “Oh, Kíli.”  She kissed his brow.  “That was only for a moment.  I would hold you close, body and soul, for all your life.”

“And after that?” he asked thoughtfully.  “You live forever.  _You’ll be this beautiful forever._ ”  He touched her face reverently, brushing his fingers along her cheek, over her ear, to catch a lock of her hair.  She laughed as he drew the smooth strands through his fingers, and he looked up from the handful of copper to her face, his eyes questioning.  

“I won’t live forever,” she said gently.  “We elves live as long as Arda, but that is not forever.”

“No,” he concurred.  “But still, what will you do after I’m gone?”

“I shall live and remember you and love you still.”  She held his gaze steadily.  “Our memories are long, my dear dwarf.  We may live in them as you mortals cannot.  I would fill my heart with you and hold you there till I might hold you in my arms again.”

He looped her hair about his fingers as if to bind her to him, and he smiled.

“Aye, I will be there waiting for you when the world gets made new,” Kíli promised.

“I have never feared for that.  I do not know the fate of dwarves, but I am certain that the All-father does not mean for those who have loved to be forever parted.”

Kíli nodded.  “Mahal has promised us, the Khazad, that at the end of days when the children of the All-father make a new Arda, we shall help to build and shape it.”

“Oh?  I had not heard that,” she answered, curious.

“It’s our treasured inheritance.  We don’t speak of it to outsiders.  Like a lot of things, I suppose,” he added, both amused and apologetic.  “But you’re not— I don’t want you to be—a stranger to us.  To me.”

“I know.”  

He took her face in his hands.  “I will prove to you how strong are the hearts of dwarves.  We have great love for the things made by our hands.   And you are far more precious than any gold or gems.  You are my treasure of fire and starlight.”  

A tear fell down her cheek and he stopped it with his thumb.  “I’ve never see you cry,” Kíli said in wonder.  He had shown himself vulnerable to Tauriel many times through injuries and pain, joy and sorrow.  He knew she felt things no less strongly than he, yet her practiced self-control had always veiled the intensity and immediacy of her emotions.  He wondered now what she had shown when she had found him so near death on Ravenhill.  

“These are not the first tears I have shed on your account,” Tauriel said tenderly, following his thought.  

“I would capture your tears in crystal or forge them into the purest gems, if I could,” he told her.  

“You’re talking like a dwarf,” she noted fondly.

“I know.”  He grinned.  “What would you have me do with them?”  

“I don’t know,” Tauriel confessed.  “An elf would put them into a song, capture them with words.  I suppose I like your proposal just as well.”

“I’m afraid I lack the skill to do them justice as gems,” he admitted.  “And my Elvish poetry is dreadful.”  Kíli shrugged.  “I’ve nothing, then.”  And before she could correct him, he leaned in and kissed the tear that had fallen down her other cheek.  

“I could be happy with nothing,” Tauriel assured him.  

“Good, because I’m afraid I have quite a lot of it.”  

“That’s a poor claim for a king,” she teased.

“I don’t want you to love me because I’m king!” he responded in mock protest.

“Kíli, when I met you, you were on the wrong side of a prison door.  I never imagined you’d wear a crown.”  The up-curved edges of her lips belied her matter-of-fact tone.

“Well, there are no bars between us now,” he said and effectively ended their jesting argument by kissing her mouth.

“Truth to tell, my father doesn’t care if you’re a king, either,” she said when she was free to speak once more.  

“Oh?” he asked, more curious than surprised.  

“Show him you deserve me just as yourself,” Tauriel said.  “I’m afraid he is not impressed by crowns or royal blood.”

Kíli nodded.  “I don’t know your elvish customs, but tell me how I can prove I know your worth, and I shall do it.”

Tauriel laughed.  “And in the meantime, I remind you that you have promised me nothing!”  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know how seriously Tolkien meant it when he said East is always up on Dwarvish maps, but I've always liked the idea. Hence Kili's reference to "down in the west."
> 
> Also, playing warrior class in Dragon Age II is responsible for my love of great two-handed battle axes. It is fun to smash things with them, and they look quite impressive strapped to your back.


	10. Chapter 10

“You were out late,” Silwen commented at breakfast the next morning.  

“Oh?” Tauriel’s tone was noncommittal.

“I came by your room after midnight, and you weren’t there.  I assumed you were engaged by pressing diplomatic concerns.”  Silwen’s eyes flashed mischievously.

“Of course,” Tauriel acknowledged with the merest hint of an embarrassed smile as she filled mugs with tea for herself and Silwen.  “Be careful with this,” she said, passing one to her friend.  “They brew it as bitter and black as the bottom of a forgotten mine shaft.”  Tauriel spooned a generous helping of honey into her own mug.

Silwen followed her example with the honey.  “Everything here is so fascinating,” she admitted, stirring her tea.  “I’ve never seen halls this size.  They stretch on forever; and yet it’s all so efficient.  My rooms even have running water!”  

“You can’t say dwarves don’t appreciate comfort!”

Silwen glanced about the room as she tasted her tea.  “I don’t think I have enjoyed simply watching people this much since, well—”  She shrugged.  “Let’s admit it: we never get very interesting visitors in the Greenwood!”  

Tauriel nodded.  “You begin to see why I like it here!”  She placed several smoked sausages on her plate as well as on Silwen’s, since her friend seemed to be too distracted by the occupants of the other tables to attend to her own plate.

“I’ve never seen people so fierce and yet so . . . funny!” Silwen stifled a giggle.  

Tauriel raised a brow, and her lips lifted in a barely contained smile.  

The brunette elf sighed.  “I mean no disrespect; you know that!  They’re just so very different.  And I think I could like them.”

“Well, if you look to your stomach, you may find yourself easily decided in their favor,” Tauriel teased.  “Here; the ones with the currants are my favorite.”  She passed Silwen a stoneware basket of rolls, all intricately woven into complex and distinctive shapes.  The dwarves, it was clear, knew the oven as well as they knew the forge.

Tauriel’s prediction proved true enough, for Silwen said little more as the two gave their attention to their meal.  

“I supposed you’re going to force me to ask: what do you think of him?” Tauriel asked as Silwen finished her second roll.  

“I’m getting to it,” she insisted.  “But first, pour me some more of that liquid mountain.”  As Tauriel refilled her tea, Silwen continued.  “I think you look handsome together, even if he is far too short for you!”

Tauriel opened her mouth to protest, and Silwen laughed.  “It is no insult!  I think the effect is rather charming, truth be told.”  She continued in a more serious tone, “Tauriel, you’ve been a warrior nearly all your life.  So have I.  Maybe in another age of the world, we would have chosen differently.  It doesn’t matter.”  Silwen shook her head.  “But when you stand next to him, you seem softer.  You are more truly a _bess_ , a woman.”  She gave her friend a teasing look.  “It could be because he is a dwarf—rough and sturdy, he is your very opposite!—but I think it is because you love him.”  

Tauriel blushed.  “All my life, I’ve known I must be strong to protect the people and places I loved.  I believed that meant I could let no one be stronger than I was.  But I find I am happy to let him be.”

Silwen regarded her companion fondly.  “I could love him for that, if for nothing else.  Though I know I shall discover his other excellent qualities soon enough!”

* * *

As the two elves were leaving the dining hall, they encountered Kíli himself, who was followed closely by a dwarf lass of nearly his own age and with whom he was in animated conversation.  

“Remember, Kíli, you promised!” the girl was saying.

“Of course, and here I am, making good on it,” he insisted, as he offered a smile to Tauriel by way of greeting.

Tauriel responded with a familiar, “Good morning,” while Silwen swept the formal curtsey she would have given her own king.  

“Good morning, Mistress Tauriel and Mistress Silwen,” Kíli returned, politely formal now, as well.  “I may I introduce you to Daín’s daughter, Mistress Frey?”

The dwarf girl made a neat bow.  “At your service,” she said with an eager smile.  Frey was dressed as the dwarf men, in trousers and shirt, though Tauriel, who had grown familiar with the appearance of dwarves, could discern a feminine air in certain details of her clothing: the drape of the tunic, the shape of a sleeve, the cut of a belt.  Tauriel knew that dwarf women wore dresses—Kíli’s mother had done so last night—but she supposed Frey’s current attire was much more practical for everyday.  

“Well met,” Tauriel answered, remembering at the last moment to say the greeting in Common.  She did not wish to offend her new acquaintance by speaking words the girl would not know.

Frey surprised her by answering in elvish, “ _Mae govannen!_ ”  At Tauriel’s sudden smile, the dwarf girl added, “I asked Kíli what I was supposed to say.”

“You’re very kind,” Tauriel told her.  Indeed, she was more than a little surprised to find Daín’s daughter so enthusiastic: though Daín had always been polite to her, she knew that he disapproved of her connection to Kíli.  

“Frey has offered to entertain you this morning,” Kíli continued.  “I’m to have my coronation clothes fitted, so I won’t be able to join you till later.”

“We would like that,” Silwen put in.  Tauriel glanced at her friend, who appeared to be as pleased about this arrangement as Frey was.  

“Good.  You should show them the restored forges and take them to your workshop,” Kíli said to Frey.  “And definitely make sure not to let them see anything they’re not supposed to yet,” he added with a mischievous look, and Tauriel wondered what he meant.

From Frey’s smile, it was clear she, at least, understood him.  “Of course!”  

“I’m sorry I have to leave you now.  My appointment will take even longer if I’m scolded for being late!” he said, and turned to go.  “I’ll look for you in your shop,” Kíli called over his shoulder as he left them.  

“Did you sleep comfortably?  Have you eaten?” Frey asked her new companions, seemingly at a loss for where to begin now that Kíli had left them to each other.  

“Yes, thank you,” Tauriel assured her.  

“Good! I— Well, we don’t get visitors very often, or didn’t back home, I mean.  And I certainly didn’t get to travel.  I’m very pleased to meet you!”  And Frey bowed again, beaming.  

Tauriel’s own smile broadened.  “I’ve rarely left my home in the Greenwood, either, so I think I understand.”

“You certainly made up for it by your recent adventures,” Silwen said, with a touch of good-natured envy.  

“I’d like to hear about them,” Frey added eagerly, then blushed, as if remembering her manners.  “If you want, that is.  Men aren’t very good story tellers,” she explained.

As they continued to talk, Frey led them down towards the workshops and forges.  Tauriel had seen this part of the halls months before.  Then, the shops had been quiet and damage from the dragon’s passing had been quite evident.  But now, broken columns and buttresses had been repaired, and they encountered quite a few dwarves moving among the many side halls and workshops, which by the glow of fires and the ring of tools, were properly in use once again.

“I thought they weren’t relighting the forges till the coronation,” Tauriel commented as they paused to look down a room where several dwarves were engaged in glassblowing.  

“Oh, you mean the great furnaces.  They’re going to be relit quite spectacularly as part of the ceremony,” Frey explained.  “But you can hardly expect us to sit on our anvils till then!  These are just some of the smaller shops, which would have been for apprentices before.  Here, I’ll show you the grand work hall.”

Frey lead them further on till the hallway opened up into a vast cavern, its roof so high as to be nearly invisible.  Before them, great furnaces rose up, their chimneys as broad and high as the tallest trees in the Greenwood.  The furnaces were dark and quiet now, but even so, the effect was impressive.  Tauriel could hardly imagine what it would be like when they were in use once more.  

“By ash and oak, you could fit the King’s throne room in here twice over, at least,” Silwen breathed in awe.  

Frey laughed.  “It’s bigger than our throne room, too.  After all, the real glory of Erebor and its king is right here, not in some fancy chair.”

Tauriel smiled, considering these vast monuments to craftsmanship and skill as a reflection of Kíli’s honor and identity as king.  She had hardly imagined him in connection with anything like this when he had been charming her through prison bars with nothing more than a smile.  

“This was where they fought back against the dragon, right?” Tauriel asked Frey, more for Silwen’s benefit than for her own.  She had already heard the story more than once.  

“It’s a wonder more wasn’t destroyed, really,” Frey answered with a nod.

Tauriel realized that both Silwen and Frey were eyeing her with a mixture of reverence and curiosity, knowing her to have seen the dragon’s wrath firsthand.  

“He came down out of the night, raining all the fires of Angband on us,” she said softly in response to their unspoken inquiries.  “I hope never to see such destruction again.”

Frey shook her head.  “The tales are bad enough.  I’m glad I never had to see it.”  Her voice brightened, taking on a tone that was cheerful yet fierce.  “But our halls are built strong, just like we are; it will take more than a dragon to dismay Durin’s folk!”  
  
When they turned back down the side hall through which they had entered, Frey ducked quickly into one of the workshops.  “We’re in luck!” she called back, beckoning the two elves to follow her.  

This particular shop appeared to be for the working of precious metals.  Tauriel could not begin to guess the names or uses of the tools she saw, but she could appreciate well enough the gems and gold which lay about the room, both in raw form and in various stages of creation.  

Frey stood before a worktable, where some unknown project lay covered by a cloth.  “We really aren’t supposed to see this yet, so if we get caught, we’re blaming it on Kíli,” she said conspiratorially.  She glanced once more at the door, and then uncovered the object on the worktable.  

It was a crown, worked in silver and set with dark blue stones.  

“Is that—?” Tauriel breathed.  

“Yes, it’s going to be Kíli’s crown,” Frey confirmed, clearly pleased with the effect her revelation had achieved.  “Go ahead; you can pick it up.”

Tauriel lifted it reverently.  “It’s so light,” she exclaimed.  Given its solid appearance in contrast to the airy woven circlets favorite by elven royalty, she had expected it to be much heavier.  She turned it slowly, admiring the way the light glanced over the different textures of smooth or brushed metal and faceted stones.  The design motif of interwoven diamond shapes was one she recognized from some of Kíli’s own gear.  There were still some empty settings at the back waiting to be filled with more blue stones, but otherwise, it appeared to be completed.

“It’s quite stunning,” Tauriel said, handing it to Silwen.  “I imagine Kíli shall look quite regal in it.”

“You mean ‘handsome,’” Silwen corrected her with a faint smile.

“He will,” Frey concurred, amused.  “Even if he will be the first beardless king of the Longbeard line!  When I first met him, I wondered if— Well,” she flushed, embarrassed that she had begun, but also clearly not wanting to seem rude by withholding.  “I wondered if he shaved his beard for you.”  She looked at Tauriel.  “I suppose you elves must find our beards strange.  But Dwalin tells me Kíli’s never worn one.  Not that he _can’t_ grow one, of course!” she finished hurriedly, and then stopped, obviously self-conscious.  

“I never doubted that,” Tauriel assured her, charmed by Frey’s defense of her kinsman.  A dwarf’s beard, she knew, was an important symbol of his—or her—identity, and she guessed it mattered to Frey that she not think slightingly of Kíli, even if, as an outsider, she might be excused for the mistake.

Frey next led them to her own workshop.  With an anvil and worktables arranged comfortably about the small corner forge, it was quite cozy.  About the room were several bins fill with hundreds of steel rings, sorted by size and design, while spread on one table was an unfinished mesh shirt.  

“Ah!” Silwen exclaimed.  “The fabled dwarf-mail!”

Frey grinned, clearly pleased.  “I’m not nearly as expert as the smiths from Erebor of old, but I’m learning all I can!  By the Maker’s sacred anvil, have you _seen_ some of the coats from the armory?  All those individually cast rings, and you can’t even see the rivets!  I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so gorgeous.”  Her expression turned dreamy.  

Tauriel nodded.  “And yet no less practical for all their beauty,” she added appreciatively.  It was thanks to just such a coat that Kíli’s injuries had not been instantly fatal: the rings had distributed the force of the blow so that it had broken bones, but not pierced vital organs.  

“Exactly!” Frey agreed.  “I was sure you were a lady of discernment.  Which is why I thought...”  She held up the unfinished coat, and Tauriel saw it was rather too long for a dwarf.  “Kíli told me your elven rangers prefer leather armor, but I thought maybe you could wear something very light if it wouldn’t hinder your movement.”  Tauriel took the mail from her.  Indeed, it was quite light and flexible, woven of tinier rings than she had seen on the dwarves’ mail.  Around the neck and over the breast, the rings were embellished by a pattern of scales.

“I thought I would leave off the sleeves,” Frey continued.  “And actually, I was planning to cut some new scales, in a slightly lighter shape.  I could make them look like leaves, if you like.”

“It’s lovely,” Tauriel told her.  “I would be honored to wear something like this.”

“Good!  I didn’t want to be presumptuous, but I do so love the challenge of a new project!  Here, try it; how much do I need to adjust it?”  Frey gestured for Tauriel to hold the mail up against her body.  “Hmm, I need to make the shoulders and waist a bit narrower; I didn’t believe you could possibly be as slender as Kíli said you were.”  She laughed.

“I heard that,” came Kíli’s voice from the workshop door behind them.  “But I can help you measure again, if you need.”  And coming up behind Tauriel, he put his arms around her waist.  

“I don’t suppose your tailor wanted to measure you in armfuls,” Frey said teasingly, tugging at the mail shirt, which was still within his clasp.

“No,” Kíli admitted, “But then, he isn’t making me _arm_ or, either.”

“He has a point,” Silwen noted with a smirk.

“I’ll have to install him in my shop as a reference till I’m done, though,” Frey agreed.

“Oh,” Kíli said disappointedly, as if just now realizing the flaw in his plan. He let go of Tauriel and moved to stand beside her.  “Did Frey show you everything worth seeing in the smithies?”

“Most certainly,” Tauriel answered with a knowing smile.  

“Good!  Where else shall we take them before lunch?  Unless, of course, you’d like us all to become permanent fixtures here,” he teased his cousin.

“Oh, Kíli, they have to see the armories!” Frey exclaimed.  “I was just telling them about the beautiful coats of mail from Thror’s day.  And there’s plate armor, too, and swords like you wouldn’t believe!”

Kíli nodded.  “Of course!  Besides, I believe I promised Tauriel her very own war axe.”  And taking Tauriel’s arm in his, he led the way from the workshop.

* * *

Later that day, Tauriel formally presented her envoy to Kíli and his advisors.  The dwarves graciously received her overtures of goodwill on behalf of the Elvenking.  She noticed perhaps a few ironic smiles, but that was no less than she expected.  Despite what had amounted to a reconciliation with their unexpected elven allies after the battle for Erebor, the dwarves could not easily forget the wood elves’ past refusal of assistance.

Tauriel suspected any other ambassador than she would have been greeted with reserve, if not outright suspicion.  But she had proved her readiness to support the dwarves by being the first of her people to come to their aid after their escape from the Greenwood.  And though she had made little of the matter herself, she knew many had heard how she had incurred exile, no matter only temporarily, by daring to support the dwarves when Thranduil laid siege to the mountain.  She had proven her word by fighting at the young dwarf prince’s side and nearly dying there; that story everyone knew, of course.  Even those like Daín, who did not want to see their king with an elf, respected her for following Kíli.  And while they might fault Kíli for loving an elf, she guessed that her love for him was never counted against her, whatever else might be.  

No-one expressed surprise or protest at having elves present for the coronation, an event Tauriel knew was unprecedented.  She might have guessed Kíli had fought that battle during her absence, had not Balin and Daín expressed sincere satisfaction at the elves’ recognition of the return of a King under the Mountain.  But of course, she and Kíli and his kin—and all who had fought in the Battle of Five Armies—had left the field unable to deny that their people’s fates were interwoven.  Indeed, Erebor had already reestablished its friendship with Dale, and Tauriel was not surprised to learn that Bard, a king in his own right, was to be present at the coronation, as well.

In truth, what had made her most nervous about the meeting was the way that Daín—and to a lesser extent, Balin—had watched her keenly, as if examining how she balanced her official role with her private feelings.  From the careful set of Kíli’s shoulders, he, too, seemed aware of their scrutiny.  She knew by the warmth of his eyes that he was happy with her, but she was grateful he kept his usual quick grin from his face, since she would have been powerless to prevent an answering smile breaking out on her own.  And while she would not otherwise have concealed her feelings, she knew that both she and Kíli must prove that their affection would not interfere in their political duties if they were to win the respect and support of those who questioned their relationship.

The two of them apparently carried themselves satisfactorily, since Balin favored her with a kindly smile as she took her leave and even Daín permitted an amused—and possibly approving—expression to cross his face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Frey's chain mail is the result of my own infatuation with the armor worn in the third film. I'd been swooning over detail shots of chain mail when I wrote this chapter. It's just so gorgeous, with textured patterns cast into the rings. I think Kili's armor, with it's combination of rings and scales, is my favorite. I did some research into medieval chain mail techniques, and was pretty amazed that anybody in the middle ages had armor to wear, since nearly all of the rings would have needed to be hand riveted. You can actually see the rivets in Bard's mail shirt in some of the scenes. 
> 
> I'm always interested to learn people's headcanons for why Kili wears a short beard. But I always feel bad for him when the explanation is that he just can't grow one! I don't think that's likely for a dwarf. Frey wants to make sure nobody thinks that's Kili's problem, either.


	11. Chapter 11

Over the following days, Tauriel returned the possessions which had been either confiscated or abandoned by the dwarves during their stay in the Greenwood.  By now, she was already on friendly terms with those of Thorin’s original company, and she was delighted to see how much the kindness of the gesture had pleased them, seeming to erase any lingering feelings of resentment, however unconscious, for her earlier part in their capture and imprisonment.  The dwarves expressed varying mixtures of amusement, surprise, and satisfaction at receiving belongings they’d forgotten or not expected to see again.  Yet all had given her heartfelt thanks for her thoughtfulness.  Bofur, fully abashed, had offered her a charming and very formal bow; Dwalin’s look of approval had meant as much as his few but sincere words of thanks; and Ori had blushed but held her gaze for once.  

Kíli was excited to see his gear again.  “I was sorry to lose these,” he said, fondly handling the pair of studded leather bracers.  “But Mr. Baggins whisked us out of our cells so quickly, I had to leave them behind.  I suppose it was just as well.  I’d probably have sunk like a stone if I was wearing all this when he dunked us in the river!”  

His gloves, baldric, and surcoat were all there as well.  “This looks nicer than it did when I left home,” he noted, examining the coat.  “Mum will be impressed with me.”

Bundled under his own gear was that of Fíli and Thorin.  Kíli paused, his hands buried in the fur on Fíli’s coat.  “I miss my brother,” he said at last, and though his voice was steady, Tauriel still heard the sorrow in it.  “Have you ever had someone you thought would always be there, that you never imagined you’d have to live without, and then...”  When he looked up at her, his eyes were wet.

Tauriel regarded him silently, her own heart aching for the pain she saw in his face.  For the elves, fated to live as long as the earth itself, every death was something like he had described.  And yet she would not claim to understand his grief—mortals, she guessed, must experience things differently, feeling more keenly the years stolen from a span already limited by death.  

She nodded at last.  “Yes, I have seen my friends die.  Though that must be nothing to the loss of a brother.”

Kíli lifted his brother’s coat and a series of knives, daggers, and throwing axes clattered to the floor.  He smiled suddenly.  “Fí always was a walking armory.  You had to be careful around him when he was a kid: if you left your knife where he could get it, he _would_.”  Kíli picked up one of the smaller throwing axes.  “I remember one time I convinced him to see how close to me he could throw an axe.  Mum nearly killed us when she found out we’d been practicing that.”  He laughed at Tauriel’s alarmed expression.  “That wasn’t the only stupid thing we ever did, I’m afraid.”

“I’ve always wanted a brother,” Tauriel told him.  “I wish I could have known yours better.”

“Fíli thought you were all right,” Kíli said.  “Probably mostly because you liked me.  But he didn’t care that you’re an elf.  He was going to take your side against Thorin, if it came to that.”

Tauriel smiled.  “He was a good brother.”

“Aye.”  He folded Fíli’s coat again and placed it atop Thorin’s things. “Mum will be glad to get these back.” He replaced the blades, as well, though the last dagger he tucked in his own belt.

“I brought a gift for you.”  Tauriel handed him a long bundle wrapped in cloth.

When he opened it and found it was an elven shortbow, Kíli laughed heartily.

“I recall quite clearly: you said you’d never give a weapon to a dwarf like me.”

“Yes, well, you’ve proven no less a threat when unarmed,” she said, her eyes merry.

He strung the bow and drew it experimentally.  The draw length was perfect.  Kíli gave her a glance that was both amused and impressed.

“Your arm-span is the same as your height,” she explained, “And I know _that_ very well.”

Kíli nodded, pleased.  “I lost my old bow in the forest when the spiders caught us.”  He ran his hands over the carved and polished wood.  “This one is just as fine.”

“We may not be as skilled as our nobler kindred, but we do craft the finest bows in Wilderland,” Tauriel told him proudly.  “Besides, when I outshoot you, I’d hate for you to owe it to superior equipment alone!”  She smirked at him.

“Oh, we’ll see about that!”

* * *

 The fortnight before the coronation passed quickly for Tauriel and Kíli both.  While receiving the crown would truly make little difference in Kíli’s normal administrative duties, the preparations for the ceremony and the celebration to follow were quite another story, for they kept him and his companions quite busy.  There was much cleaning of the ceremonial halls: stone was polished, tapestries cleaned and hung, lamps filled, and extra seating arranged.  The kitchens were also abustle with baking, and there was a great deal of anxiety and anticipation surrounding the completion of the celebratory batch of ale.  

Tauriel had been there in the cellars when a sample cask of ale was broached: she, Kíli, and a handful of others had waited in suspense as Dori systematically inspected the color, head, and aroma, and then drained the glass in silence.  After a few tense moments, he had pronounced the brew fully satisfactory, to the great relief and excitement of those present.  Someone had handed her a full tankard, and she had amused Kíli by finishing it, despite her initial grimace of distaste: it was full-bodied, both bitter and sweet at once.  “I think it’s almost tolerable,” she had announced after her last swallow.  “Our beers are like us,” Kíli had said, regarding her proudly.  “A little overpowering at first, perhaps, but they’ll grow on you.”

Since the dwarves were quite busy with preparations, Tauriel and the other elves had spent several days in a survey of the mountain slopes.  Tauriel brought a notebook and sketched out plans for reforestation.  Already, there was new growth showing on the mountain sides, as if the earth felt the dragon’s blight lifted, and trees and plants would grow more swiftly and beautifully with hands to guide them.  She and her companions searched out the loveliest places for a grove of oaks, a stand of pine or aspen or beech.  If she made up a list now, it would still be early enough to send for saplings from home.  And after Erebor, there was always Dale to consider, too.  She had heard they were once famous for the climbing roses that festooned wall and courtyard.  She would like to see those grow again.

Though Kíli and Tauriel were often busy with their separate duties, they made time to see each other when they could.  Breakfast was the surest time to catch Kíli before someone stole him off to ask whether he wanted midnight or burgundy banners in the hall of kings or to insist that he finalize the seating arrangements for the banquet.  Other times, Tauriel would relax with him and his young friends over pints of ale at the end of a day.  In addition to Frey and Ori, they were usually joined by Frey’s elder brother Thorin (who had shared his namesake with Kíli’s uncle) and Gimli, Gloin’s boy, who was some years younger than Kíli was.  

Once or twice, Tauriel had even visited Kíli in the evenings in the rooms he shared with his mother.  Tauriel enjoyed seeing the two of them together, watching the affection they had for one another.  If Kíli had seemed dismissive the first time he had mentioned the mother who worried for him, it was not because he did not value the love which her concern represented.  In turn, Dís appeared to value being reunited with her son as much, if not more, than the regaining of Erebor itself.  Tauriel felt both blessed and yet unworthy to claim credit for having given Kíli back to her.  In saving him, Tauriel had not thought beyond what he meant to herself.

Dís continued to prove both kind and welcoming to the young elf, though at times, Tauriel fancied the dwarf woman held some part of herself in reserve.  Nonetheless, imagining the reception Kíli would have received from her own parents, Tauriel was both grateful and surprised, an attitude that Dís seemed to sense.  

“You may not be what I imagined for my son, but you are all I have wished for him,” Dís told her quite candidly one night when Kíli had left them alone for a while.

“I— Thank you,” Tauriel managed, surprised to find how much Dís’s words came as a relief.  She had felt that Kíli’s mother had been evaluating her ever since they had met.  “The first time I spoke with your son, he told me of his promise to you.”

“I understand I have you to thank for helping him keep that promise, on more than one count.”

“I did all with a most willing heart,” Tauriel told her, knowing from Dís’s answering gaze that the woman recognized her devotion to Kíli.  

“I’m glad.”  Dís studied Tauriel’s face.  “Answer me one question, then, and you shall have overcome the only true objection I could have.  There is no formal pledge between you yet, I think, and so I would know: what do you mean to be to him?  Forgive me, I don’t want to think you would treat him lightly, but, well, there never has been such a connection between an elf and a dwarf before.  I know your kind are grieved by the passing of all things, and I worry you might find it easier to leave him before you must see him leave you.  Sometimes it’s easier to love the flowers that bloom at the roadside as you pass them than to bring them home and watch them fade in the glass on your table, isn’t it?”

Tauriel smiled wistfully at the comparison.  “You’re right; most of my people would say so.  Indeed, that is the counsel my own parents have given me.  They say that if I love Kíli in memory, it will not matter that he is mortal.  Or a dwarf.”  She laughed softly.  “But I can’t.  Have you never felt, when you looked on something beautiful, that you dearly wanted to be one with it and to know it fully?  And have you felt your heart ache when you knew you could not?”  Tauriel shook her head, and brought her distant eyes back to Dís’s own.  “That is what I feel for Kíli.  I would rather face losing him one day than never be able to know him as I desire.

“No, we have made no pledge as yet.  But I am ready to be all that he could ask of me.  In a way, we are already bound by what happened on Ravenhill, and I would not undo that, even if I could.”

Dís nodded.  “I believe you, love.  And will you forgive me for having doubted?”

“What am I to forgive?  He is your son, and you have shown that you love him.”

Dís took Tauriel’s hand in her own and pressed it.

Kíli had come back into the room then and had pretended—rather unconvincingly—not to have noticed their moment of understanding.  But as he was clearly pleased, neither Tauriel nor Dís made anything of his poor disguise.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapters like this one made me really sorry Fili can't be in this fic, and ultimately I gave in and started a second story with Fili (and Thorin). So I'm putting in a little plug here for [So Comes Snow After Fire](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5280206/chapters/12186896), now with 200% more Durins! 
> 
> You can find Fili's opinion of Tauriel in [Starlight Reflected](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5284136).
> 
> I loved Kili's matching bracers and baldric from the first movie, and was excited to discover I could give them back to him without violating canon. While looking at screencaps, I was somewhat surprised to discover that a lot of the dwarves' gear lost in Mirkwood is not, in fact, confiscated by the elves but simply left behind in their cells. Kili, for example, is locked up while wearing his overcoat and bracers and things, but he takes them off once he's in the cell (you can see them piled up on the bench behind him in the scene with Tauriel). Presumably, the decision was made in the movie so that the poor dwarves wouldn't be completely waterlogged in all those layers of costume when they escape in the barrels. And I suppose in terms of narrative, the loss can be accounted for by the fact that they left the cells too quickly to gather all their things. Otherwise, you'd think they would want to bring their gear if they were planning an escape. Anyway, as a hard-core renaissance festival cosplayer, I really appreciate all the details and care that went into the costume design and continuity in the films. And by "appreciate," I mean "drool over."


	12. Chapter 12

The eve of the coronation was on them soon enough.  Amazingly, everything seemed to be in order at last: the halls set for both ceremony and banquet, the great furnaces fueled and ready to take flame once more, guest rooms prepared for Bard and his entourage from Dale, who were to arrive early the next morning.  As the day drew to a close, the halls calmed as preparations finally wound down, though there remained an almost palpable air of anticipation throughout the mountain.  

After what had been a rather late dinner, Kíli and Tauriel had stolen away.  Kíli had led them to the throne room, which, of all places, was empty now.  The two of them strolled, hand in hand, up the carpeted aisle before the throne.  With the lamps burning low, the great pillared hall resembled a twilit forest, and Kíli found himself hoping he might walk with her like this through a true woodland someday soon.  

“Are you nervous?”  She spoke softly, as if reluctant to disturb the silence that reigned in the hall.  Yet then she laughed, a bright sound that echoed from the walls.  “How foolish I sound!  Of course you must be, and I do not blame you.”

“Yes.”  He shifted his hand in hers so that their fingers intertwined.  “They’ll all be looking to me.  Looking _at_ me.  Sometimes I don’t know how Uncle ever did it, how he could lead with so many eyes watching him.  He was good at that: at making people want to watch him and want to follow him.”  Kíli stopped walking: they had reached the few steps that led to the throne. 

He looked up at it, imagining his uncle, his grandfather, and all their forebears who had ruled from there.

“I thought that would be my destiny, following Thorin.”  He glanced up to find Tauriel watching him earnestly.  “I’d have been very good at it.  I would have given anything for him: it would have been easy to be reckless,” he said knowingly, and she smiled then.

“And now?  Well...”  He shrugged.  “I want to know I can be like him, too.”

“I believe you will be.”  Tauriel’s voice was gentle and certain, and he took comfort from it as from the truth.  “To lead, you must see where you would go.  You must believe in what you would gain.  And that is what I have loved in you.”

He waited for her to go on, curious.

“You asked me to come with you,” she explained, and he thought she seemed almost embarrassed.  “You knew what we could have together, and you didn’t hold back because of doubt or uncertainty.  When you said you loved me, you were beautiful.”  She blushed, and Kíli found he was delighted at how vulnerable she let herself be before him.  “I am sorry I told you I did not understand.”

“You’re forgiven,” he said contentedly.  He drew her up the steps to the dais and handed her into the throne.  

“Sometimes I used to wonder how Thranduil felt, surveying us all from his lofty seat,” she said, settling carefully into the throne.  Despite her elven stature, she did not appear oversized for the imposing stone chair.  “But I never dared try it myself.  The King would have been furious!”

Kíli grinned.  “Furious wouldn’t begin to cover it if Thorin saw us now!  He’d probably disinherit me.  For a start, anyway.”  

“We could run away to exile together, then,” she said, mischievous.  Then more thoughtfully, she added, “I’m glad we didn’t come to that or to loving in secret.  Would we have dared?”  

“I think we’re being daring, even now.”  Kíli took something from an inner pocket of his surcoat, though he kept whatever it was hidden in his hand until he had placed it in hers.

When he took his hand away, she saw it was a pair of golden hair combs, joined by a slender chain hung with tiny faceted emeralds.  One comb was in the shape of a dragon with an arrow held in its claws; the other was made in the form of an oak branch starred with little flowers among the leaves.  Each comb was accented by a few more green stones in the eyes of the dragon and the centers of the flowers.

Tauriel drew in her breath.    “Those are athelas blossoms,” she said slowly, once she had looked closely at the designs.  “Did you make this for me?”

Kíli nodded proudly.  “Tauriel, I want to court you as is proper.  A dwarf always gives his lady gifts that he’s crafted just for her.  It’s partly to tell her she’s his treasure and partly to prove that he can provide for her by the skill of his hands.  The gifts are hers to keep, and she’s under no obligation to her suitor by accepting them.  Though, of course, if she wishes, she can show her favor by wearing them.”

She was beaming at him, and he felt utterly helpless before her.  

“Would you...?”  Tauriel offered him the combs.

He took them from her and tucked them into the braids that wound back from her temples so that the chain and pendent emeralds lay across her brow.  The green stones shone especially bright against her coppery hair.  

“You look, um...”  Kíli didn’t think there was a word for how she nearly broke his heart by gazing at him with adoration in her eyes and his gold in her hair.

He leaned in to kiss her, and she moved with him so that they ended up pressed against the back of the throne.  Kíli had set one knee up on the seat and Tauriel was winding her arms round him when there came the dry crackle of shuffled pages from behind her.  They both froze, and Kíli found he was unable to extricate himself from her embrace without landing in her lap in a most undignified way.  

In the next moment, Balin appear from around the back of the throne, his eyes on the checklist he carried.  Kíli and Tauriel exchanged alarmed glances, but before either of them could do more, Balin paused, noticing them.

“You’d best get used to your new throne,” he said, unconcerned, then turned and walked back the way he had come.  

Neither Kíli nor Tauriel moved for several more long moments, and then Kíli began laughing so that he really did collapse against her.  

“I was certain he was going to order us to have some respect for the throne,” Tauriel said weakly.

“I suppose—” Kíli began, and then went on laughing against her.  He was definitely kneeling in her lap now, and she shifted so that he could rest his weight on the seat without moving off her.  He went on at last, “I suppose, if you’re not going to respect me, the throne is kind of a lost cause.”

Tauriel laughed, low and soft, and kissed him.  “I respect you very much, Kíli.  And I imagine after tomorrow, I shall have to respect you even more.”

He breathed a laugh.  “I love you, Tauriel,” he continued solemnly.  

“ _Amrâlimê, le mellon_ ,” she returned, and he smiled at the mixture of dwarvish and elvish words.

Kíli touched the gems on her brow. “I’m glad I could give you this tonight.  I wanted to court you as myself and as king.  I’m both now.  Almost.”

“Almost,” she echoed.  “Did I tell you, King Thranduil refused me his son because I have no noble blood?”

Kíli’s brows went up.  “Legolas asked for your hand?”  

She shook her head.  “No, but Thranduil was clear on where I stood with regards to the Prince.”  She smiled.  “You needn’t be jealous.  I did not care for him that way.”

“But he cared for you,” Kíli guessed.  “And I suppose if you had, you’d have defied Thranduil anyway.”

She giggled.  “Am I that simple to predict?  But I suppose you are not the only reckless one.” Tauriel swept a lock of hair back from his face, and as she tucked it behind his ear, her fingers caught on one of the braids that he had been wearing for the past week now.  “I like your hair this way,” she said.  

“I do actually know how to do a braid,” Kíli joked, “Though Mum has always despaired of my putting the knowledge to any use!  But since I’m to be king, I decided to make an effort.”

“You still won’t grow your beard, even now?” Tauriel asked curiously.  She had certainly wondered why he wore his beard trimmed, even before Frey had mentioned it, though she had been reluctant to ask, afraid of offending him.  She did not think she would offend him, now.

“No.  I know it’s not traditional, but—”  Kíli paused, not because he was unwilling to tell her, but simply because the answer mattered.

“I told you, my dad died when I was pretty young.  I don’t have a lot of memories, but I did know him.  He always wore his beard short, like uncle Thorin did, in memory of the dwarves who died when the dragon came.  Not everybody who was from Erebor did that, but my family remembered.  I asked Dad once why he didn’t wear a big fancy beard like everyone else, and he told me his had been singed off by the dragon and he wasn’t going to grow it out again till we reclaimed our home.  I was quite impressed, of course, and I swore I wouldn’t grow my beard till he did.  That was the only promise I ever made my dad, and I’d like to keep it.  Maybe it’s silly, but it matters to me.”

“I do not think it is silly,” Tauriel said.

“Besides,” he flashed her a smile, “I’m told elf girls don’t like long beards.”

“I like being able to see your face,” she admitted.  

Kíli leaned into her and kissed her once more, and she wound her fingers through his hair.

He drew her with him when he stood.  “I have one last visit to make tonight,” he said softly, and Tauriel nodded, not needing to ask what he meant. 

They left by the same back entrance Balin had used, though the passage was empty now.

“Sleep well, my lady,” Kíli said as they paused outside the throne room.  

“And you, my almost-king.”

They parted, she for her chambers and he to the royal funeral vaults.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My headcanon for Kili's short beard is inspired by an interview in which Richard Armitage explained his consolation for not being allowed an impressive beard as Thorin. He referenced the "singed beards" of the escaped dwarves in the book.
> 
> Dwarvish courtship customs are entirely my own invention, though I took some inspiration from the article "Who's the Bride" over on the [Dwarrow Scholar](https://dwarrowscholar.wordpress.com/) blog. In a society where women are scarce, the woman's choice would almost certainly take authority in a courtship situation, but since Dwarvish society is patriarchal, I still imagine the man doing the asking, with the woman able to either accept or deny him. Given the fact that dwarves value wealth and craftsmanship (as well as hospitality), I think it makes sense for gift-giving to play a large role in dwarvish courtship, but my idea is that the gifts are, in a sense, an application for the woman's consideration and that the lady may keep them, even if she does not accept the man. Since not all dwarf women take spouses, such a custom would still allow for a woman who remains unwed to provide for herself.


	13. Chapter 13

It probably wasn’t very respectful to sit on someone’s tomb, Kíli thought.  But his brother wouldn’t have wanted Kíli to treat him with reverent solemnity.  To do so would be to acknowledge a distance between them never to be crossed.  So here he sat on the face of the raised tomb, at Fili’s shoulder.  

_I wish you could be here to see me get my crown,_ he thought.  _Well, if you were here, I wouldn’t be doing this, but we can pretend, like we used to._

As boys, they had played at being kings together, slaying dragons and righting the wrongs against Durin’s house.  Usually, the game had ended with them reestablishing the kingdom of Erebor under their uncle Thorin’s rule.  It had never been a problem to imagine three kings.  To be king had simply meant to be a hero, a legend, to fulfill a destiny.  And there had been no question in their minds that Thorin was the greatest of them, anyway.  

When they had grown old enough to understand what the line of succession truly meant, their understanding of their roles had shifted somewhat, going from kings to protectors, faithful thanes.  If Thorin was to take his throne, they would see him there.  Fíli, of course, would expect to be king after him, and Kíli?  He would always have someone to support and to follow.  To expect otherwise was to name the loss of uncle and brother, something Kíli had denied could ever be true.  He had already lost a father, and he needed Thorin and Fíli to remain unshakeable.  

Their children’s game had become reality when, as young men, Fíli and Kíli had followed Thorin to the mountain.  But nothing ended the way they had planned.

The thought of having to lead now had scared Kíli at first: he’d never planned to be the figurehead, the one people looked up to.  He had found all the courage he needed when it was in service of someone he loved, but to command that love from others?  He’d never expected he would need to.  

He had been coming to see that leading was no less of a service.  As king of his people, he had just as much duty to protect and support them as he had done for his uncle and even his brother.  And after all, weren’t Fíli and Thorin right here with the very heart of the mountain itself, the Arkenstone?  The stone which bestowed the right of kingship had been set upon Thorin’s tomb, never to leave Erebor.  Kíli could see it now, glimmering in the darkness, the only source of light in the chamber.  It was a sign that the king’s rule was tied to this place, and that, indeed, the only way to be a king was to preserve the home of his people.  So, in a sense, taking the crown was Kíli’s way of continuing to follow Fíli and Thorin.  He liked thinking of it that way, since it meant he could still fulfill the only duty he had ever believed would be his.  But even so, that knowledge couldn’t stop him from missing them both terribly.  

Especially Fíli.  

He wished Fíli could be here to see him be courageous.  To tell him he’d do well, and still help him plan his escape in case it all turned out to be an unmitigated disaster.  Of course it wouldn’t be, but joking about it would have made him less scared that it could.  Was this what it was like being the eldest: this self-reliance, this knowledge that nobody else was going to figure things out for you?  Not that Kíli had ever had a problem thinking for himself, but he’d always had his elder brother to lead the way and show him how it could be done, even if Kíli chose to do something entirely different.  How had Fíli always been so sure of himself?  Was it always this daunting to find your own way or did you get used to it after a while?

But more important than his nervousness or discomfort, he felt the great honor he was being given with the crown.  He and his brother had known their royal lineage all their lives, and had been proud to be sons and heirs of Durin.  And so he wished Fíli could be there to see him fulfill their heritage, to be happy with him and for him.

He put a hand to the dagger at his belt, thinking of all the times he had seen it in his brother’s hand: the blade had nearly been an extension of Fíli himself.  If only it were so easy to touch Fíli still.  Kíli would have given nearly anything to feel his brother’s arm across his shoulders.  Maker’s beard, he’d even settle for a punch to the gut—Fíli always did know how to end a fight swiftly and effectively.  Not that they’d fought often, not in earnest; perhaps that was why Kíli remembered the few times they had.  And now he’d never have the chance to fight his brother, or to hug him, again.

The sound of footsteps slowly grew in the hallway outside the mausoleum, and Kíli closed his fingers round the dagger haft, not from any real expectation of using it, but as a kind of defense against being disturbed.

The steps halted in the door behind him.

“I thought I might find ye here, lad,” came Dwalin’s deep voice after a few moments.

Kíli released his hold on the knife.  He was glad it was Dwalin.  Dwalin wasn’t someone who lectured you unnecessarily or pinned you down with trite talk.  If he said something, it was worth saying, and if he didn’t, his crushing grip on your shoulder was enough for what you needed.

“I know ye miss ‘im,” Dwalin said, drawing closer.  “You lads used to be nigh inseparable, both out of trouble and in, though ye were in more like than not.”  Some of that trouble had certainly been at their elder kinsman’s expense, but Dwalin’s tone was fond.  “Where was it ye hid m’ boots once upon a time?”

Kíli’s mouth lifted in an involuntary grin.  “The butter churn.”

“Aye.  They stank of sour milk for days.”

“You can thank Fíli for that.  I was for putting them in with the pickled fish.”

Dwalin grunted in amusement.  “I’d ask where ye came by such barmy schemes if Balin and I had n’ been as bad when we were your age.”

He seated himself next to Kíli.  “We once loosened the head on Dad’s work hammer, ‘n’ when he took the first swing, the head flew off ‘n’ cracked ‘im right between the eyes.”  He chuckled.  “He’d have let us have it, too, except that he’d lectured us just that morning over keeping our tools in good repair.  He had the sense to see he hadn’t set quite the right example.”

Kíli laughed softly at the thought of the venerable Balin participating in such a prank.  Though it was not perhaps so hard to see Dwalin doing so.

“I’m sorry about the boots,” Kíli offered with a smile.

“Nah, you were good lads.” Dwalin laid a hand on Kíli’s shoulder.  “You still are, both of you.”  

Kíli looked away, his eyes suddenly wet.  

“What if I’m not what everybody wants?” he asked after a while.  “I’m too young, and I— I’m in love with an elf.  I’ve heard what they say: they want a king to bring back the old days.  But even my crown is new.”

Dwalin tightened his grip on Kíli’s shoulder.  “Lad, what they want is a good king.  And you’ll be that.”

“Thanks,” Kíli said.

“You’ll make all of us proud tomorrow.  You already do.”

Kíli nodded as Dwalin stood.  “I’ll leave you to your vigil,” the older dwarf said and he left.

There had been another vigil at another tomb, years ago.  After their father’s funeral, Kíli and Fíli had watched the night at his  side.  It had been Fíli’s idea, but Kíli had understood that it was important that they not leave their father alone this first night sleeping within the stone.  Kíli hadn’t lasted very long—he’d been only six—and had fallen asleep half kneeling, half leaning against the newly-hewn stone of the tomb.  He didn’t know if his brother had stayed awake the night long, but Fíli had been standing watch when Kíli awoke the next morning, pillowed on Fíli’s folded surcoat.  

Kíli rather wished he could have given Fíli his own vigil back in December, but then Kíli had just barely managed the funeral.  He’d only recently woken from his own wounds, and they’d had to carry him to the mausoleum.  There had been no question that he would attend: everyone knew he needed to say goodbye.  But when they had chanted their dirges and sealed the tombs, Kíli had made no protest when he was returned to his rooms.

But maybe this was better, anyway, Kíli thought as he stood and turned to face his brother for his watch.  A vigil then would have been a grief and a goodbye only.  Now it was, well, not quite a celebration, but something like that.  It was the recognition of a journey completed, another begun.  This one would be different, as every new adventure was.  Fíli would not be with him this time, but the others would be, Dwalin, and Tauriel, his mother, and even Daín.  And anyway, wasn’t Kíli who he was and where he was today because of his brother?  Becoming king was something of a fulfillment for both of them.  Kíli just needed his brother to send him on his way.

Perhaps it was Fíli standing vigil much as Kíli was.

“Thanks, big brother.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Basically, Mr. Dwalin is my favorite.
> 
> I've followed fan canon on the death of Fili and Kili's father because it makes sense to me that he certainly would have gone on the quest if he were alive. But I recently found this fantastic [illustration](http://morwen09.deviantart.com/art/You-will-be-the-youngest-in-the-squad-425553720) of the creation of Thorin's company that has a unique take one why Dis's husband stayed home: he was injured and lost a leg. I'd love to see a fanfic that posits he's still alive but couldn't come on the quest (tell me if you know of any!). Though the behind the scenes material for the movies indicates that Fili and Kili's dad is supposed to have died, there isn't anything in the films themselves that would contradict the notion that he's alive but incapacitated for such an adventure. (Also, the artist I linked has an amazing Tolkien gallery featuring lots of less-illustrated scenes from the legendarium; I recommend you take a look at her work!)


	14. Chapter 14

Dís was already awake when Kíli returned to their rooms early the next morning.  Had she actually slept either? he wondered momentarily.  Then she had swept him into a hug.

“Good morning, my jewel,” she said.  She had always called him and Fíli that, her jewels.  He still liked it that she did, as long as it wasn’t in front of people.  

“Did you rest?” she asked, smoothing his hair.  

“I’m fine, Mum,” Kíli said gently.  “I was—  I was with Fí.”  

She nodded, understanding.  “You’ve a big day, love,” she said, and kissed him before letting him go.

Kíli sat down at the table, not really sure where he wanted to start on all the things waiting for him.  Perhaps washing his face...

Dís returned a few moments later and placed a mug of tea in front of him.  It had just the right amount of milk in it.  Kíli sipped at it, grateful.

Behind him, Dís began tugging the braids loose from his hair, then combing it.  Kíli relaxed under her touch.  He had always liked having his hair combed, though his mother hadn’t done it for him since he was a boy.  He had let her braid it then, too, because he liked the feel of her fingers in his hair.  Eventually, he’d realized that he was old enough to comb it for himself and had stopped coming to her, more out of a sense of propriety than anything else.  He’d never bothered with braiding his own hair, though—that had been too much trouble. 

Kíli was happy that she did it for him today, that she had known, without asking, what would make him feel loved.  

When she had bound off the last braid, she kissed the top of his head.  “I laid your clothes out in your room,” she said and left him.

Kíli finished the last swallow of tea and went to his chambers.  His coronation suit was there on his bed: the blue tunic with ornate silver embroidery and the matching leather surcoat, a shade of darker blue and heavy with ornamental silver scales.  Blue and silver, those were the colors of his house.  Thorin had worn them, and Kíli often had, too, though never in so elaborate a fashion as this.

He went to the washstand and splashed cold water on his face.  He could have got hot water from the bath tap, but he needed something bracing: today was for doing things that might be uncomfortable but were good for you all the same.  As Kíli was toweling his face, one of his braids fell forward and he noticed the bead that fastened it.  It was one of his father’s; he knew it from his mother’s jewelry casket, though she had never worn them.  He checked the other braids, and all were finished with the matching beads.  Kíli’s throat momentarily constricted with emotion at being unexpectedly found worthy of the man he had always loved, but had hardly known.

He put on the tunic and matching trousers, though he saved the surcoat for later: he wanted to ease into the role of king.  His new boots were already carefully broken in.  Stiff and uncomfortable shoes would have made him feel like he was pretending, playing a part that wasn’t really his own and that he would take off at the end of the day, along with the unfamiliar clothes.

Tugging on the boots, he checked the hidden sheath on the outside of his right ankle for Fíli’s throwing knife, though he knew it would be there.  It was.

Kíli paused for a moment before strapping on his belt.  Beside the buckle that went with the rest of his ceremonial outfit, his mother had laid the enormous jeweled belt clasp his uncle Thorin had always worn, and which Tauriel had recently returned with the rest of Thorin’s things.  Kíli had always been so impressed by it as a boy, imagining that he’d get to wear something like it when he grew to be a man.  Now he felt slightly presumptuous clasping it on his own belt, as if Thorin would see him and ask what he was doing with it.

He shook the foolish thought out of his head.  Hadn’t Thorin said once to their mother that Fíli and Kíli were as good as the sons he would never have?  Thorin would have wanted Kíli to wear it.  He smiled slightly as he fastened the buckle at his waist.  

They were all here with him: Father, Fíli, Thorin.  He was glad.

Glancing in the mirror, Kíli decided he was regal enough for a soon-to-be king who hadn’t eaten breakfast yet.  Yes, breakfast—bacon, toast and maybe some eggs, if he were lucky—seemed the most logical next step.  He left his rooms and headed for the kitchens.

* * *

  
“What do you think?”  Frey stepped back so that Tauriel might have an unhindered view of her dressing table mirror.

“It’s beautiful.”  Tauriel surveyed the intricate braids that swept back from her face and were looped into a loose knot at the back of her head.  “Thank you, Frey.”

The dwarf girl beamed.  “You’re welcome.  You have such amazing hair,” she said appreciatively.  “It’s like spun copper.”

“Is that what Kíli says about me?”

“No!”  Frey giggled.  “At least, not around me.  But it’s true, anyway.”  She carefully adjusted a braided strand.  “Kíli will think you’re beautiful, too.  Just—” She grinned.  “Try not to break our new king before we’ve had him a full day yet.”

“What—”  Tauriel mirrored Frey’s smile.

“That _is_ his courtship gold, isn’t it?”  She gestured to the combs that lay on the dressing table.

Tauriel nodded.  “Yes.”  If Frey had guessed so quickly, others would, too.

“You will make him very happy by wearing it,” Frey explained.  “It’s a lucky dwarf who wins his lady’s heart.  There are so few of us women, you see, so we get to choose the man we like best.  Or take none at all.”

“Have you ever been courted?”

“Oh, no,” Frey said dismissively, but Tauriel noted the faint smile on her lips.  Was there someone she fancied?

“What does a lady do when the man she favors hasn’t paid her the attention she wishes?” Tauriel prompted, intrigued.

“Well, she could always just tell him.  But where would be the fun in that?”

“Agreed!”  After a pause, Tauriel went on.  “Thank you, Frey, for your kindness to me.  I know I am an outsider and Kíli—he’s not just any dwarf, he’s your king.  I would not have blamed you for resenting me.”

A sudden smile of amusement lit Frey’s face.  “Hammer and tongs, Tauriel!”  She tried to stifle her laughter, but gave up.  “Kíli isn’t someone I—  He’s very nice and I like him dearly, but—”  She finally managed to gain control of herself, though she said no more.

“I know that, now,” Tauriel explained, amused as well.  “But can you blame me for worrying, at first?”

“No.”  Frey shook her head.  “I am glad you make each other happy.”  She regarded Tauriel thoughtfully.  “Kíli has been very brave.  To lose half his family and then have to learn to be king on top of that—  Well, it’s good he has someone to fill his heart.  

“Sometimes I think my Da forgets that.  He does care for Kíli, but he wants so much to help make him a fine king that he forgets Kíli needs other things, too.  So forgive him if he seems harsh.  Da means it kindly.”

“I will,” Tauriel said.  “And I am grateful Kíli has the support of his friends.”

Frey smiled.  “Well, we shan’t be much help today if we don’t get dressed!  I’ll see you in the ceremonial hall, if not before!”

“Thank you again,” Tauriel said earnestly.

“Of course!  I’m glad you asked.”  Frey bowed and left.

Tauriel lifted the golden combs and studied them once again.  The details were so meticulous, from the veins on the oak leaves to the dragon’s scales and the feathered fletching on the arrow.  Was it meant to be the arrow that had slain the beast or the one that had nearly claimed Kíli’s own life before she found him in Laketown?  Perhaps it was both.  She smiled gently.  The images told her and Kíli’s story, what there was of it so far: the young archer prince wounded in pursuit of the dragon’s gold, and she, his silvan savior, the two of them linked by fate, by love.  And what might be to come?  Her heart overflowed to find out.

* * *

  
Erebor was in a state of commotion, thanks to the arrival of the entourage from Dale, so Tauriel spent the rest of the morning with her elven envoy.  It was drawing on to late morning when a messenger ducked into the room just long enough to say that Kíli wanted her to meet him in one of the royal receiving rooms.

She had been waiting several minutes by the time he arrived and closed the door gratefully behind him.  From his breathing, she could tell he had been running.  “Everybody keeps telling me what needs to be done and then refusing to let me do anything,” he blurted by way of explanation.  Then he froze as he caught full sight of her.

“Mahal’s forge, you are beautiful,” he said at last.  

She smiled in answer.

“I never told you, but...  The night after we left Laketown, I dreamed you came to me,” he said haltingly.  “You were clad in stars and your hair was like woven flame.  But you were nowhere as lovely as you are now.”  

Her gown was the rich blue of a summer night sky, the cloth sprinkled with small, clear gems that glittered when she moved.  A wide neckline showed off her flawless pale shoulders, and her throat was clasped by the simple silver chain with the star-shaped gem she always wore.

“I was going to wear this for the Feast of Starlight last fall,” she said, shifting a handful of skirt.  “But I never made it up in time to change.”

“You were saving it for me,” he said happily, moving to her side.  “You’re so...slight,” he remarked, laying a cautious hand on her narrow, corseted waist.  “I won’t break you if I hold you too tight, will I?  What?” He gave her a puzzled look in response to her sudden peal of laughter.

“Oh, Frey said I wasn’t to break you,” she explained.

He snorted.  “Doesn’t she know it’s already too late for me?” he said, clasping both arms round Tauriel’s waist.  He sighed contentedly and leaned against her.  “I’m glad you’re here.  I mean, not just for my coronation.”

“I know.  So am I.”

There came the sound of voices in the adjoining room, and Kíli released her.  

“Right,” he said with a look that was both amused and slightly conspiratorial.  “The real reason I called you was to help me welcome Bard’s family.”

Tauriel had time to give him an answering nod, before the door opposite the one by which Kíli had come was opened, and Bofur entered, followed by Bard’s three children.  

Bofur drew himself up with elaborate formality and announced, “Prince Kíli and Mistress Tauriel, may I present young Master Bain and Mistresses Sigrid and Tilda.”  Bain bowed and his two sisters curtseyed neatly.  

Bofur relaxed then, and added more familiarly, “O’ course you’ve all met before, but it feels like we were all different folk then.”

“Welcome,” Kíli said warmly.  “I’m glad that, after all the kindness you showed us, we may begin to return the favor.”

Sigrid, the elder girl, smiled, self-conscious.  “Thank you for having us at your coronation.  We know what an honor it is.”

Tilda giggled.  “You really didn’t look like a king when you climbed out of our toilet!”  Sigrid gave her a horrified glance, though Bain stifled a laugh.

Tauriel looked at Kíli from under a quizzical brow, but he merely said, “It’s a secret dwarvish right of passage.  All our kings have to do it.”

The younger girl laughed heartily, and Sigrid permitted herself a smile then.  

There was a pause, and Tauriel realized their guests were regarding her with curiosity.  

“I am pleased to meet you again under these much happier circumstances,” she said.  Before, amidst the commotion of defending the dwarves and the children, healing Kíli, and then fleeing the burning town, Tauriel could not remember if she had even told them her name.  “As Kíli has said, you were kind and also very brave.  I am honored to count you my friends.”

Kíli motioned to Tauriel, and she followed him to a table at the side of the room, where she found the gifts she and Kíli had chosen beforehand.

“Please accept these tokens of our thanks,” Kíli said.  He presented Bain with a dagger in a handsomely worked sheath.  The boy’s eye’s lit as he took the knife from Kíli’s hands.  “I’ve never owned a dagger this fine,” he said, admiring the blade which he had politely only half-drawn from the sheath.  “Thank you.”

Kíli grinned, clearly pleased with this reception.

Tauriel next offered the girls matching gold chains hung with teardrop gems, rubies for Tilda and sapphires for Sigrid.  “You should have some dwarvish gold by which to remember this joyful day,” she told them.  

The girls were as pleased by their gifts as Bain had been, and they thanked their hosts politely.  

Kíli bowed graciously.  “Thank you very much for coming.  You are my friends, and I’m glad you’re here.  Now, I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me.  I need to finish dressing for the ceremony.”

Tauriel caught his hand as he turned to go.  “Kíli, you will be magnificent,” she whispered and kissed him.  

“Thanks,” he breathed.

“I _told_ you they fancied each other,” Tilda whispered perfectly audibly as Kíli closed the door behind him.

Her sister answered her with a look of embarrassment and alarm.  

“She wouldn’t believe me!” the younger girl continued, looking to Tauriel for confirmation.  

Tauriel laughed.  “You are quite perceptive.”


	15. Chapter 15

A short time later, Tauriel and her elven companions made their way to the throne room, where the coronation ceremony was to be held.  Seating had been arranged among the columns of the hall, on either side of a central aisle leading up to the throne.  When the dwarves had returned to the mountain, the throne had been where Thror, in his greed and pride, had set it to survey his domain, alone and nearly unapproachable above the mountain halls and aisles.  Now it was returned to this audience hall, where the king might see and be seen by his people.  

The elves were given a place quite near the dais among Kíli’s relations and nearest friends, including all of those from Thorin’s company.  Tauriel wasn’t quite sure what principle governed the rest of the seating, though Bard, his children, and a few other men from Dale were also nearby.  

The hall filled quickly, and the last dwarves had not long taken their seats when the ringing of deep-throated horns announced the beginning of the ceremony.  

A procession of dwarves began making their way towards the throne from the back of the hall.  

Kíli strode at their head, taller than any of the rest. Carrying himself nobly, his chin high and his shoulders square, he looked their king already.

Ori, seated beside Tauriel, touched her arm and whispered, “The dwarves behind him represent the seven patriarchal houses: Longbeards, Firebeards, Broadbeams, Ironfists, Blacklocks, Stiffbeards, Stonefoots.  They’ve all come to recognize Kíli as king.”  Daín, Tauriel saw, stood for the Longbeards, though she did not recognize the dwarves from the other houses.

When Kíli reached the dais, he halted facing the throne, while the other dwarves passed him, on both left and right, spreading themselves in a line before him and turning to face him.  Daín stood in the center, directly before Kíli.  

The deep horns rang once more.

* * *

  
Even though Daín stood on the first step of the dais, his head was merely level with Kíli’s own, Kíli realized as he faced his cousin.  Sometimes he had felt self-conscious about his height, but today Kíli was glad that all he had to do to look the part of king was to stand up straight.  He wasn’t sure he could have managed anything more complicated, with so many people staring at him.

“You who approach the throne of Erebor, declare yourself,” Daín addressed him.  The words of the ceremony were all in Khuzdul, the language of history and lore which all the dwarves knew, even if, like Kíli’s clan, they did not speak it daily.  Ori had promised Kíli to sit next to Tauriel and translate for her.  

“I am Kíli,” he responded, “Son of Dís, daughter of Thrain the Second.”  

He continued, reciting the list of his forbears and tracing his family line back to Durin the Deathless himself.  He’d practiced the list incessantly over the last few weeks, chanting the names of ancestors on the stairs to the counsel room, in the bath, and even lying in bed waiting for sleep.  He’d probably have the names of long-dead dwarves still chasing around his brain on his own death bed years from now, but as long as he got them right today, that would be a small price to pay.

“. . . son of Durin the First,” he heard himself finish.  He wasn’t quite sure how he’d got there, but Daín hadn’t stopped him, so apparently he had said the names in the right order.  The lineage was important: kingship was hereditary.  As long as he proved his birthright to the throne, the seven houses would recognize him.  There was no election or other process by which a king was chosen.  

“The Longbeard clan recognizes Durin’s son,” Daín said formally, and Kíli caught the hint of an approving smile in his face.

“As do the Firebeards,” the dwarf at Daín’s right confirmed, his affirmation repeated by the rest of the seven houses.

Kíli knelt.

The head of the Firebeards came forward and offered him an ornate iron hammer, the head of which was worked with an image of the seven stars of Durin’s crown.  The hammer was a reminder of the dwarves’ own making at the hand of Mahal, from whom they derived their own love of crafting and the creation of beautiful things.  As king, he was the craftsman of his people’s wellbeing, their peace and their wealth.

“Do you swear to do all for the good of your people, to make for them glory and strength?” the clan leader asked.

“I swear,” Kíli said and closed his right hand over the haft of the hammer.

Next, the leader of the Broadbeams came forward, holding a ceremonial war axe.  In turn, the second patriarch addressed him, “Do you swear to protect your people, in peace by law and judgment and in war by the strength of your arm?”

“I swear,” Kíli said again, taking the axe in his left hand, and holding it crossed over the hammer in his right.  

Balin came forward now, from where he had waited off to the side of the dais, bearing the crown in his hands.  Daín took it from him, and the other clansmen drew around Kíli, encircling him.   

The seven patriarchs laid their hands on the crown, and together, they placed it on Kíli’s brow.  

“Rise, Durin, and take your throne,” Daín said once more.  The patriarchs stood aside, clearing the path to the throne.  

Kíli rose and strode slowly but firmly up the last few steps.  

He hadn’t actually sat in it yet; last night with Tauriel didn’t count.  This would be the moment when he truly took his place in the line of kings.

He turned, and there were the faces of his friends and his kin, watching him eagerly.  In that moment, all he felt was joy at being able to stand there before them all.  These were the people who had seen him grow up, given him friendship and counsel, and cared, in their separate ways, that he do well with his life.  Seeing him on the throne now was not simply the fulfillment of their hopes for Erebor, it was the completion of their hopes for him.  The knowledge made him glad.

Kíli was sitting now, though he didn’t remember doing it, which was perhaps just as well, since he wasn’t exactly sure he could have told his knees what to do.  

“Behold your King under the mountain!”  Daín’s commanding voice rang out through the hall and for the third time, the horns sounded.  The assembled dwarves gave a great shout.  

Kíli saw his mother was crying.  Dori, too, had tears in his eyes, and even Dwalin brushed his knuckles over his cheek once.  Many of the others—especially Ori and Nori, as well as Gimli and Frey and her brother—were cheering enthusiastically.  And Tauriel—  Well, she was watching him so happily that he felt he couldn’t have been more pleased with himself if he had personally invented the moon and all the stars.

* * *

  
Following the ceremony, everyone made a great procession from the audience room to the great work hall, where even more dwarves had gathered for the lighting of the forges.  This time, the furnaces had been properly fueled for relighting, and it would not take the full blaze of dragon’s fire to start them.  

  
Kíli laid a torch to the fueled channel that led to the central forge.  The flame raced along it and down into the heart of the furnace.  There was a rush of fuel igniting, though nothing was visible yet, and then twin flames ran away to the furnaces on either side of the first one and on to the others beyond them.  

The first furnace blazed high in a burst of heat and light, followed in a few seconds by the furnaces beyond it, and then the furnaces beyond them still.

Everyone cheered, the sound echoing back from the far walls in such a happy clamor that Tauriel wondered if the hall was ever this loud when crafting was fully underway.  

Someone struck up a song, a joyous, rolling tune about the gleam of gold and the music of the forge and the return of Durin to his realm.  Kíli was hoisted onto a pair of shoulders and carried to the banquet hall at the head of the exuberant crowd.  

In the dining hall, Tauriel had been about to take a seat among the rest of the elven envoy when Kíli was suddenly at her side.  

“You’re not an ambassador today,” he told her, slipping his arm through hers and drawing her up to the high table.  Kíli seated her to his left, between his mother and the leader of the Ironfists.  Dís smiled at her, an expression that deepened from one of general happiness to a more private pleasure, and Tauriel supposed the dwarf woman had recognized the gold Tauriel wore at her brow.

Tauriel had never seen so much food before.  There was roast boar and venison, and every kind of fish from the lake, sausages and savory pies. There was even a pudding that had been made in the shape of the Lonely Mountain, and which was sliced open to reveal a mound of candied nuts presided over by a large, marzipan dragon.  Ales, wine, and mead flowed freely, adding to everyone’s already merry spirits.

When the last of the food had been cleared away, a harper took his place below the royal table, and all hushed to hear his song.  It was a ballad, newly composed, telling the adventures of Thorin’s company of thirteen, plus a halfling and a wizard, who had set out from distant lands far to the west, and journeyed over mountain and under forest, down rivers and through fire to reclaim their home.  She was in it, Tauriel realized, though the bard made her sound like a wood spirit sent by the consort of Mahal to guard the destiny of a dwarf young prince.  She laughed.  It was not untrue, really.

Then tables were drawn back out of the way and dwarves with viols, flutes, drums, and oboes began to play a lively dancing tune.  Kíli was at Tauriel’s side almost immediately.  “I promised I’d teach you to dance,” he said.  “Are you ready?”

Dwarvish dances were not hard to learn, Tauriel found.  One’s part largely mirrored that of his partner.  There were not specialized mens’ or women’s roles as in the elven dances she knew.  The difference made sense, given the scarcity of dwarf women; it meant everyone who wished could dance, regardless of his or her partner.  Indeed, the dances involved a lot of swapping of partners, and she had danced with many of her dwarven friends, including Bofur, who insisted on standing on a table to match her in height, and Daín, who had forgotten to look dissatisfied about her newly-validated connection to Kíli as he twirled her handily on his arm.

A short while later, Kíli found her where she had collapsed onto a bench, away from the dance floor.  

“You make a very good dwarf, as far as a party is concerned,” he said, taking a place at her side.

“Do not think yours are the only folk who know how to make merry,” she scolded playfully over the brim of her tankard.

“I’m ready to believe you, if you will invite me to am elvish party some time.  Wait, is that—”  He caught at her mug.  “You’re drinking my coronation ale!”

“That’s what it’s for, is it not?” she asked innocently.  

“It’ll put hair on your chest and turn you into a dwarf!” he cautioned, amused.

“Well, if that happens, at least I know you won’t care,” she teased back.  

He laughed and regarded her with a ridiculous expression, which she supposed meant he was trying not to imagine her with a hairy chest.  

Tauriel kissed him.  “I love you, your majesty.”

Kíli smiled.  “You know, it sounds rather nice when you say it.”

“‘Your majesty,’ or ‘I love you’?”

“Both.  So don’t stop.”

“Yes, your majesty.”  Finishing her drink, she pulled him from his seat, and they returned to the dancing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Although dwarf women are not traditionally named in genealogies, Kili names his mother because his claim to the throne comes through her. While there's not enough evidence from the books to know exactly how dwarvish succession would work, obviously this is the film's interpretation and I'm going with it.
> 
> According to Tolkien, Khuzdul is more of a book language at this point in the history of Middle Earth, though all dwarves learn it. Sort of like the equivalent of Latin, I suppose? I know that the dwarves' names in the books aren't even Khuzdul, but are "outside" names picked up from human languages that the dwarves use around non-dwarves. I still think in a public ceremony such as a coronation that outside names would probably have been used.


	16. Chapter 16

The first afternoon Kíli had free after the coronation, he had gone shooting with Tauriel.  They had hiked along the mountain slope for half an hour, he carrying the target on his back and she the satchel that contained their lunch.  When they had found a dell sheltered from the breeze, Kíli had set up their target.

“I believe it is your right as king to shoot first,” Tauriel told him as she strung her bow.

“And I shall defer to the lady,” he had countered readily, matching her smile of challenge with one of his own.

Tauriel nocked an arrow, drew, and released, all in one smooth, graceful movement.  Such beauty belonged to a dance, not the battlefield.  Kíli recalled his first sight of her battling spiders in Mirkwood.  If he’d not been fighting for his own life then, he would have gladly watched her, enthralled.

Her arrow found its mark within the center circle of the target.  She smiled saucily at him, as if to say, _match that if you can_.  Kíli knew she would be expecting him to split her arrow with his own.  That was the trick everyone asked for.  

Kíli selected an arrow and set it to the string.  He held the fletching to his cheek longer than she had; he wasn’t going to pretend to the casual grace of her own technique.

He loosed the string.

The arrow landed slightly to the right of hers.

“I think I deserve three tries,” he said lightly, “Given that this is a new bow.”

“I will grant you that,” Tauriel said, amused.

He shot again. This time the arrow struck barely to the left of hers.

Tauriel was silent as he drew a third time.  The last arrow flew slightly high.

“I never expected to be so closely challenged by a dwarf,” Tauriel said, impressed, as they walked up to retrieve their arrows.  Kíli stood aside to let her collect hers first, as was her privilege as the first to shoot.  

She grasped the shaft and tugged, but found the arrow would not come free, pinned as it was by the heads of the three arrows Kíli had shot.  

Tauriel looked to him with newfound admiration in her eyes.  “I concede this round to you after all.”

He nodded politely and drew his arrows.  “I’ve always thought this a better trick,” he explained.  “And you don’t have to waste a good arrow.”

“I promise I will make good any of your arrows that I break,” Tauriel told him archly.

In truth, she only split one of his, for after she had proved herself in the next round, they had been content with less competitive practice.

“And why did you chose the bow?  I should think it a less popular choice for a dwarf,” Tauriel had asked as they retrieved their arrows once more.

“Well, the knives were always Fíli’s thing.  He was really good at it.  So I had to pick something different, you know?”  He shrugged and pulled his last arrow from the target.  “But I really like shooting.  There’s that timeless moment after you release the string and before the arrow finds its mark—  It always makes me feel sort of weightless.”  

Tauriel nodded.  She could not fully understand the sort of rivalry Kíli must have felt with his brother’s skill, but she knew the pleasure of a well-executed shot.

Kíli grinned, remembering.  “Fíli was a terrible bowman!  He was lucky to hit the inner rings on the target, most days.  It made me feel good to be able to do something he couldn’t.”

When they were tired, they found seats leaning against a great smooth rock and ate their lunch.

“So, what are you going to do now?” Kíli asked as he cut himself another piece of bread.  “Your official diplomatic visit is served for now.”

“I want to bring trees to Erebor,” Tauriel said.  “If I return for them now, there will yet be time to plaint them before the heat of summer.  I will not be gone long.  A fortnight, at most.”

Kíli nodded.  “Thorin said these slopes were once cloaked in trees that roared like the ocean under the wind.  I’d like to see them that way again.”

“I long to see trees that scatter light, not gather darkness.  The forest was become Mirkwood long before I was born.”  Tauriel’s expression was wistful.

Kíli munched his bread thoughtfully.  “Tell me, do elves celebrate birthdays?”

“Of course!  Why?” 

“I just thought maybe, I mean, you have so many.  You don’t get tired of them?”

“We do not tire of something just because it happens time and again.  Would you tire of new leaves in the spring?”  She spoke with that gently incredulous, amused tone that had so pleased Kíli from the first time they had spoken together.  It was proof that she found in him something different, something unexpected and pleasing.

“I suppose not!  So when is yours?”

“Two days before midsummer’s eve.”

Kíli smiled; of course it was.  “And how old will you be?”

“I will be six hundred and eighty-one this year,” she told him.

Kíli’s eyes widened.  “I’m just a baby, compared with you!”  He sounded slightly dismayed.

Tauriel tried to hold back her smile.  “Kíli, how old _did_ you think I was?”

He shrugged.  “Maybe...a hundred?”

She laughed unrestrainedly.  

“I mean, I know you elves are ageless and all, but...” he explained, self conscious now.  “You seem so young.”

“I _am_ young,” she protested, still laughing.  “Among my people, I can’t be considered much older than you.  And you are...?”

“I turned seventy-seven last September,” Kíli said.  “Did you know, I traced back the dates of our journey, and last year I had my birthday when we were in the Greenwood.  It must have been right about when I met you. Of course, I didn’t realize it at the time.  We kind of lost track of the days in the forest.”

It was Tauriel’s turn to look dismayed.  “I locked you in prison on your birthday? Kíli, I’m sorry!”

He grinned, pleased by her concern.  “It’s all right!  It was still a good day.”

“Mmm, well, I think I shall still have to make up for it this year,” she concluded.  

“Well, you never did search me,” he noted.  

“And I surely would not dare this time, now that you’re king,” she countered.  “It would hardly be respectful.”

“It was worth a try.”  He gave her the cheeky smile that she had always found so charming.

Tauriel shook her head, though she smiled.  Kíli tucked his arm in hers and leaned his head on her shoulder, and the two of them had half-dozed in the warm midday sun before finally gathering their things and returning under the mountain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one is short--I've been revising my chapter divisions in order to keep related scenes together, and this scene ended up stuck on its own between two longer chapters.


	17. Chapter 17

Tauriel had gone back to the Greenwood and returned with her trees for the slopes of Erebor.  Silwen and a handful of other elves had come back with her to aid in the planting.  Kíli even helped her when he was free, finding a new pleasure in the touch of dirt and green growing things, particularly when her hands guided his.  

Spring was swiftly passing into summer in a succession of warm mornings on the mountain sides and cool afternoons in council chamber and audience hall.  Kíli had continued his formal courtship of Tauriel, adding to his dwarvish gifts of metal and gem more elvish offerings at Silwen’s advice.  Tauriel often returned to her room to find flowers there— even pink roses from Dale—and once, a very humorous (and poorly rhymed) poem incorporating all the traditional motifs of love poetry, though misattributing each of them, so that roses and lilies were in her eyes, gold in her skin, and the sun in her hair.  Tauriel suspected Silwen must have hinted at her impatience for elaborate compliments paid through verse, for the poem had been a studied effort at subversion, which Tauriel found unprecedentedly charming in its intentionally clumsy expression of real adoration.

Silwen soon proved herself Kíli’s ally in yet another way, as well.

* * *

  
He was thinking of her again.  Legolas shook his head slightly.  Despite all the times he told himself he wouldn’t, she always came to mind during the slow watches at the forest border when the night was still.  With Dol Guldur overthrown at last, there were fewer dark creatures to trouble the nights and more time in silence to think.

What if thirteen dwarves had never lost their way through his father’s realm?  What if the youngest dwarf prince had never had the insolence (or the courage) to smile at his pretty elven captor?  Or what if—Legolas hated himself for wondering it—Kíli had perished as had so many others in that battle for the Lonely Mountain?  What if Legolas had simply overcome his pride—or was it his father’s?—and told her of his love before any of those other things could have mattered?  Legolas knew he tormented himself with such questions, but he could not seem to avoid them here on patrol when her absence was so conspicuous.  

Near dawn, his thoughts were interrupted by the approach of travelers on the old eastern road.  Even before they were in view, he knew there was at least one of his own folk in the party; the road had been dangerous and impassible until lately, and only one of the Silvans would have known to dare the route now.

Indeed, he soon recognized the young woman Silwen, with her dark braids pinned up on her head like a crown.  Behind her, the shadows resolved into one—no, two—figures somewhat more than half her height. Dwarves, curse them.  He was in no mood to deal with dwarves.

Silwen halted below him.  She would know they had been seen by the guard by now.  

Legolas slipped down from the tree into the path in front of her.

“Mae govannen, Silwen,” he said, and to the figures behind her, “Travelers, declare yourselves.”

Silwen seemed startled to see him, but before she showed more, the taller of the dwarves stepped forward and drew back his hood.

“Greetings, my lord.  I come solely as the spokesman of the King Under the Mountain.”  And he bowed.  

It was the dwarf king himself, Legolas realized.  He wore nothing to indicate his station— no regal robes or circlet upon his brow—but Legolas knew him nonetheless.  When last they had met, Kíli had been only a prince, and a nearly dead one at that, but Legolas was hardly likely to forget the face of the man Tauriel had nearly given her life to save.

“This is my kinsman, Dwalin.” Kíli gestured to the dwarf behind him, who gave a curt bow, as well.  

Legolas inclined his head slightly.  Several other elves of the guard had emerged from the trees and stood loosely about them, at attention, though with no weapons drawn.

“And what is your business here?” the elf prince demanded.

Kíli said, “I come on a personal errand to Gilfaron.”  That was Tauriel’s father.  “I do not wish to make a great matter of my visit.  I will pay formal honors to the king another time.”  He was asking that Thranduil not be told he was here.  At any other time, Legolas would have refused.  It was the king’s right to know all who passed through his realm.  And yet Legolas himself had no desire to tell his father he had allowed the dwarf king entrance in order to request Tauriel’s hand.  Thranduil was aware of his son’s feelings for her: Legolas’s pursuit of her and all that followed had made sure of that.  Legolas did not want to face his father’s censure—or his sympathy—on something that was beyond helping.

“I give you leave to proceed,” he said evenly.  He added, forcing a warmth he did not feel into his voice, “I wish you well in your visit.”  It would not do for him to be insolent to a neighbor king.  More importantly, he did not want Tauriel to hear he had behaved poorly.  What would she think of him?

“Thank you.  I remain at your service,” Kíli said.  A cautious smile broke over his features.

A stab of emotion—bitterness? or just regret?—went through Legolas.  Kíli’s was the smile that warmed her heart now.  His was the happiness that mattered to hers.

Legolas sighed.  He could add to her happiness now by aiding Kíli in his own.  Of course Legolas would make that sacrifice for her: he loved her.  He only wished it did not have to hurt so much.

“Fare you well,” Legolas said, surprising himself with the calm of his own voice.  He stepped aside and let them pass.

Silwen cast him a grateful, sympathetic glance as she went by, and Legolas nodded to her slightly.  In that moment, he was glad that one person knew what he had just given.  


* * *

 Kíli thought he had felt as nervous as he would ever be at his coronation, but that was nothing to this.  Then, he could have tripped on the stairs or even tangled the order of his ancestors and still have become king.  But now, standing before Tauriel’s father, he was keenly aware of how his future happiness and hers depended on how he carried himself.  One misstep could decide Gilfaron against him for good.

The elf had greeted Kíli graciously enough, though his wife had peered silently at their daughter's suitor from behind her husband. Gilfaron had then shown Kíli into a private room, a study, it seemed, from the desk with pens and ink and the few though clearly treasured books along one wall.

The elf had stood for some moments now, simply surveying him.  Kíli, who had been trying to make the most of his height in the hopes of appearing not entirely unbecoming to elvish eyes suddenly hoped his posture did not appear too proud.

“I am honored to receive you,” Gilfaron said at last.  He seemed to mean it.

“The honor is mine,” Kíli said.  When it was clear that the elf waited for him to proceed, he went on.  “You must know: I would marry your daughter.”

Gilfaron nodded.  His expression was unreadable.

Kíli took a slow breath.  “I do not wish to take her against your will.  That would be theft in the eyes of my people as well as yours.”  He had planned what he wanted to say, and now that he had begun, the almost-sick feeling in his stomach had eased somewhat and his voice felt steadier.  

“Perhaps if I had only my own happiness to consider...”  He left the thought unspoken, knowing it would be understood nonetheless.  “But I’m a king.  I must think of my people.  I cannot disgrace them.  

“And Tauriel...”  He smiled briefly at her name.  “I could not cause such a rift for her.  She would have to live with it much longer than I.  I can’t make her lose the love and respect of her kin.”

This brought an ironic smile from the elf.  

“So I am here, entirely at your mercy,” Kíli finished steadily.  It was not a plea, but a statement of fact.  

Gilfaron laughed.  “This is a position I never imagined for myself: to hold power over a dwarf king.”  

The elf’s laughter had been at the situation, but not at him, Kíli thought.  It seemed a good sign, but he must not allow himself to hope yet.  His chest already felt too full of other emotions; one more and his ribs might break.

Gilfaron went on, solemn once more.  “I feared you would demand my consent in deference to your crown.  And yet I see your kingship is the very reason you defer to me.”  He smiled slightly, perhaps even approvingly.  “You present yourself well.”

Kíli reminded himself to breathe.

Gilfaron’s brow clouded slightly.  “Tell me, what would you do if I refused my blessing?”

“Surely you would not force such a choice on your daughter, to choose between me and you,” Kíli said softly, voicing the only thought in his mind.  _Idiot, that’s not an answer,_ he scolded himself.  “I should do whatever she asked of me,” he said after another moment.  Kíli knew it wasn’t a promise to let her go.  He could not say he would and feel it was not a lie.  If Tauriel chose to remain with him despite a father’s disapproval, he did not think he could refuse her.

Her father would know what Kíli meant or perhaps did not mean, but he seemed satisfied with the answer nonetheless.  The elf’s voice was gentler, even a little wistful, when he spoke at last.

“You are right; I would not force such a choice on her.  Nor on you, because she loves you.”

Kíli knew it was not sympathy for himself, but rather concern for what Kíli’s distress would mean to Tauriel, that prompted these words.

Kíli nodded.  His heart, he realized, was pounding harder than hammer strokes in a smithy.  

“I will grant you my daughter’s hand,” Gilfaron said clearly.  

“I—your service—thank you,” Kíli managed and sank to one knee. His breath and heartbeat seemed to have forgotten their purpose, for both carried on without seeming to do him any good at all.

Gilfaron, unused to having kings kneel on his rug, came and raised Kíli to his feet.  “You are fair spoken, I will grant you that,” he said, with a glint of humor in his eyes.  

Kíli was grateful there was not enough breath in him for the laugh that would otherwise have escaped. Gilfaron seemed to mean that Kíli’s words were the only fair thing about him, a pronouncement that was somewhat in doubt, given Kíli’s last inarticulate utterance.  Yet for all that, the words seemed kindly meant.

Calimîreth did not seem surprised by the agreement between her husband and the dwarf, and she attentively, if rather tacitly, served them refreshment after the interview.  

Yet as Kíli was leaving, she had taken him by the shoulders and studied him. He gazed up at her openly, wondering what she looked for and hoping she found it.  Finally the elf woman cautiously pressed a hand against his bearded cheek.  

“Make her happy,” she whispered and kissed his forehead.

“I promise.”

* * *

 “I’m not sure I could survive that a second time,” Kíli admitted to Dwalin later that evening as the two dwarves rode east from the forest on the ponies that had brought them.  

Dwalin chuckled.  “Ye did good, lad.  If ye had n’ been tremblin’ in yer boots, he’d ‘ave never had ye.  A father wants to know a man’s right afraid to love ‘is daughter, and even more so not to.”

Kíli breathed deeply of the fragrant evening air, grateful that his lungs had ceased their earlier mutiny.  He wondered vaguely if he could ever find himself inflicting a similar ordeal on a young man someday, and then realized with a sharp prick of both happiness and terror that, after the outcome of today’s interview, it was entirely possible he would. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The terrible poetry is part of my headcannon for why Tauriel would even have bothered talking to Kili after his stupid trousers line. I figure she doesn't seem like the kind of girl who'd have patience for the elaborate compliments that must be popular with elvish suitors. (I imagine elvish compliments must have conventions as strict as those for Renaissance lyric poetry.) Anyway, I figure Tauriel found Kili, awkward and hopeless as he was, interesting and amusing enough for a second chance.


	18. Chapter 18

Two days before midsummer, on Tauriel’s birthday, Kíli rode with her down to the shores of the lake.  There, a boat had been waiting for them, and they rowed out onto the water and watched the setting sun turn sky and water to flame.  

“The last time we were here, the whole world was truly afire,” Tauriel mused, drawing her fingers through the water.  

Kíli nodded, glancing away across the lake behind her to the dark ruins of Laketown where, already, new buildings were rising above the wreckage.  Bard was using his share of the treasure to rebuild his old home as well as the town of Dale.

“I’m glad the gold of Erebor can at last do something good,” he said.  “Maybe it will begin to atone for my family’s curse.”  

“Kíli, you are not cursed,” Tauriel said softly.  She laid her hand over his on the gunwale.  

“Thank you.”  The edge of his mouth quirked upwards.  “Though some people might say that would explain how I came to be trapped in a boat with an elf.  You might murder me. Or worse.”

“Well, for a start, I think I shall make you drink wine with me,” she said with a smirk, filling a glass and handing it to him.  It was a lavender mead, favored by the elves as a summer wine; her father had sent it to her as a gift.  

Tauriel settled herself in the bottom of the boat, leaning against Kíli’s legs as he sat behind her on the thwart.  They counted the stars that were flickering to life above them as the boat drifted with the breeze on the smooth water.  

Kíli’s fingers strayed through her hair, smoothing it over her neck and shoulders.  After they had been sitting for some minutes without speaking, he slipped his hand beneath her chin and tipped her head back to kiss him.  Her lips were sweet with mead.

“I want you to know my name,” he said.  

Tauriel turned so that she was facing him, her arms propped on his lap.  “It’s not Kíli,” she said.

He shook his head.  “I mean, Kíli is what everyone has always called me, so it’s not that it _isn’t_ my name.  But it’s not my true name.  

“All of us dwarves have our secret names.  We don’t share them with outsiders and we don’t write them down.  Only those closest to us know them, our families and those we love.”

“We have names like that, among the elves,” Tauriel agreed.

“My name is Bakhâl,” Kíli said.

“Bakhâl” she repeated, trying out unfamiliar syllables.  She smiled up at him.  “I love you, Bakhâl.”

He leaned down and kissed her.  

“My mother,” Tauriel said, “when I was yet a little child, named me Thalind.  She said she knew I was going to be stubborn.”

He laughed softly.  “Is that what it means?”

“Yes. But it can also be understood to mean a steadfast heart.”

“I like that better.”

* * *

 Kíli rowed them back to shore in the hour before dawn, and as they drew the boat up on the shingled beach, the first rays of sunlight broke over them.  As they moved from the shore, Kíli caught Tauriel’s hand and drew her to a stop beside him.  

“We were standing here, not quite a year ago, when I promised I’d come back to you.  And here we are, both of us again.”

Tauriel clearly remembered the hope that had shone in his face then.  She saw hope in him now, less impetuous, more sure, and yet as beautiful as before.  A smile slowly spread across her face.

“I know what I want now, if you’ve anything to ask,” she said.

Kíli clasped her hand in both of his.  “Will you be my love?  My starlight?  My elf queen?  The treasure of my hands and the jewel of my heart?  Tauriel, will you marry me?”

“I promise,” she told him.  

There were tears on his face; Tauriel felt them fall on her skin as she drew him to her breast.  

“I’m sorry,” Kíli said after a moment.  “I hope you can think of something to tell everyone back home, because I’m going to die of happiness.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” she whispered and slipped down on her knee to kiss him.  From his own enthusiastic response, Kíli did not seem in any immediate danger of expiring.

“Your father said I could have you,” he said when her lips had strayed from his own.  

“What?  When did you—”

“Mm...  A fortnight ago, when I went to Dale and Silwen was on an errand back to the Greenwood.”

“That was crafty!  I wondered why Silwen hadn’t left instructions for the repairs to her flet when we were there before...”  She placed a last kiss in the hollow of his throat, then raised her head to meet his gaze. “My parents were kind to you?”  

“They were.  They could not pretend I was everything they wanted, but I can forgive them for that because it was clear that they love you.”

“Oh Kíli, I’m glad.  I was afraid...”

“Well, there were a few minutes when I thought I was going to die on your father’s rug.  Not that he did anything!  But my lungs forgot to work.”

Tauriel smiled, trying to imagine him facing her father.  “Thank you for being brave for me,” she said, both jesting and serious.

He nodded.  “Now I can give you your birthday present,” he said, and pressed something into her hand.  

The early sunlight flashed from a large faceted emerald set in gold and strung on a golden chain.  As she turned the pendant, she found that the back was wrought into the shape of an oak leaf with the edges gently curled about the stone to hold it in place.  

“It’s wonderful,” Tauriel breathed.

“It’s not _just_ your birthday present,” Kíli explained.  “It’s also my last courtship gift.  The final one is always a stone; the lady only accepts if she means to marry.”

“So everyone will know I’ve accepted you,” she said, looking from the stone to his face.  “Is that all there is to it? Do I not need to seek your family’s approval?”

“Oh, we’ll have a party for you, don’t worry.  But as the woman, you really do get to decide if you want me or not.  And since you do, nothing else is needed to make it official.  Don’t worry,” he added. “Silwen told me about your elvish betrothals, and I also thought, well, maybe later this year we could pay your family a visit and do it properly by your customs as well.”

“I’d like that.”

Tauriel offered the chain to Kíli and he clasped it about her neck.  

“You look beautiful,” he told her.

“And you look as happy as I wished I could have made you those many months ago.”

She took his hand, and this time, they went up from the lake together.  

* * *

 As Kíli had promised, there was a betrothal feast soon after their return.  Tauriel found it slightly odd to be the center of attention; people gave her and Kíli the same mixture of interest and deference she always seen offered to her king and prince back home.  Even being the Elvenking’s envoy had not been like this.  But now as Kíli’s betrothed, she was suddenly worthy of notice.  Well, official notice, that was.  The dwarves had always watched her as a novelty, but now they could acknowledge her connection to Kíli.

Their betrothal made little difference among her close friends, but those dwarves who knew her less well became more open with her, as if their King’s formal choice of her had finally settled their indecision about whether to accept her presence among them.  Even those who did not approve of her being an elf seemed more relaxed around her, at last knowing where she stood in regards to them.  And even if it did mean the occasional doubtful glance or grudging concession—no-one would be outright rude to the king’s betrothed—it was an improvement to the embarrassed, furtive notice it replaced.  

Even Daín seemed to soften towards her somewhat.  Tauriel wasn’t sure if it was because he saw that Kíli was happy, or that she had not seemed to distract him over much from his duties as king.

Frey had likely been right that Kíli needed something to set his heart on against all the change and responsibilities that he faced.  But Tauriel thought there seemed a part of him that could come to flourish under his newfound leadership.  It was the tiniest bud now, but given time, it would come to full leaf.  He merely waited on the love of his people to know what he could be as their leader and king.  Would having her at his side slow them from seeing his worth?  She could only hope that it would be enough for his people to see that she loved him, too.

* * *

 When Kíli accompanied Tauriel home in the fall, there had been no question of slipping unannounced past the forest borders.  For one thing, Kíli had brought a small group of his nearest kin with him: elvish betrothals were a celebration between the two families about to be joined.  But more important, he wanted to prove himself a respectful and courteous neighbor king.  Kíli could hardly sneak in and steal away with his elven bride.  First, he would have to formally present himself to the Elvenking.  

Kíli had never met Thranduil.  After the Battle of Five Armies, Kíli had been too hurt to see anyone for some days, and Balin and Daín had managed things in his absence.  And before, when he and his companions had been held captive in Mirkwood, only Thorin had been given an audience with the Elvenking.  

Afterwards, his uncle had said little of the meeting, a fact which was sure enough proof of how badly it had gone.  All Kíli knew was that Thranduil had refused to acknowledge Thorin’s kingship.  But if Thranduil had treated Thorin with haughty scorn, Thorin was more than capable of matching it.  Doubtless, the meeting had resulted in bruised pride on both sides.  
Kíli was glad he did not know what had been said then.  He felt the meeting could be awkward enough without remembered insults between him and his erstwhile captor.

* * *

 “What if he laughs in my face?” Kíli had asked Tauriel when she came to find him in his guest rooms.  He had a sudden fear that Thorin, even half-covered in spider webs, had presented a more imposing figure than he could.  

“Then you must stand up to him,” Tauriel said.  “But I do not think he will laugh.”

“I’d teach the poncy elf how he’s to treat the King Under the Mountain,” Dwalin growled behind him, and Kíli smiled, grateful for the sentiment and mostly sure that his cousin didn’t mean to act on his words, much as he might have liked to.

“You look quite fine,” Tauriel assured Kíli, tucking a piece of hair back behind his circlet with its seven jeweled stars.  “And your manners are handsome, as well.  Thranduil could not scorn you without dishonor to himself.”

* * *

Tauriel was grateful Thranduil had chosen one of the reception rooms for the meeting, rather than the grand throne room.  It meant he did not intend to overawe his guests.  Given his pleasure in an imposing presence, Tauriel took his choice as an encouraging sign.

Thranduil was alone when she and Kíli entered.  

“Majesty.”  Tauriel dropped a graceful curtsey.  “May I present his majesty Kíli, King Under the Mountain.”

Kíli gave a half bow which was respectful but not overly deferent, a fitting gesture from one king to another.  Thranduil returned the courtesy.

“Welcome to the Woodland Realm,” the Elvenking said, and though his eyes showed that the irony of the moment was not lost on him, there was no mockery in his tone.

Thranduil was the tallest elf Kíli had ever seen, or at least he seemed it with his long white-gold hair and trailing silver robe.  He held himself tall and proud, fully capable of looming over one without seeming to try.  Kíli wondered if he would have had the courage to set his eye on any elf maid if the first elves he had met had been anything like this woodland king.   But Tauriel was nothing like him, he thought, save perhaps in her unconscious grace.  

“I am honored,” Kíli returned.  

“I trust you find our hospitality somewhat mended of late,” Thranduil continued, and this time there was humor in his voice.  

Kíli smiled, both relieved and amused that the elf had acknowledged the less than ideal nature of their past relations.  Emboldened, he admitted, “It may be more than I deserve.  I’m afraid I took no care for the order of your kingdom when I subverted the loyalty of your captain.”

Tauriel felt her cheeks burning.

The Elvenking regarded him stonily for a few moments, and Kíli feared he had gone too far.  Then the elf laughed, not unkindly.  “I have found that loyalty is not to be commanded, but given.”  The suggestion of a smile flitted over his lips.  “Let us call our debts even and speak no more of it.”

Kíli nodded.  “I will do so happily, with hopes of greater friendship between the Wood and the Mountain than there has been.”

“You speak in accordance with my will.”

Kíli went on, “I must ask your pardon on one count, however.”  If the Elvenking had taken the jest, he could not be offended now, when Kíli spoke in earnest.  “I have no intention of dismissing your captain’s loyalty.  In fact, I have come to claim it fully for myself.”

Though he was never afterwards able to explain it, Kíli thought that the Elvenking’s expression was momentarily wistful.  

“How should I prevent you?” Thranduil said, his tone unreadable.  Kili did not know how to answer, and it was Tauriel who broke the silence.

“Thank you, my lord.”

“That is fine work,” the Elvenking noted, his eyes falling on the green jewel that glinted from her open collar.  “A king does not give such gifts lightly.”

Tauriel nodded, remembering the gems Thranduil had sought so eagerly from the dragon’s treasure hoard.  Their return had been the hobbit’s final act of reconciliation between her people and the dwarves after the battle had been won.   _What had been their significance to the king?_ she wondered.

“I wish you a peaceful stay,” Thranduil said, turning to Kíli once more.

Kíli thanked him and returned the Elvenking’s bow.  It was not till Kíli and Tauriel stood outside the audience chamber that he noticed his hand had found its way into hers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got Kili's Khuzdul name from the Neo Khuzdul dictionary available at the Dwarrow Scholar blog. As I understand, Neo Khuzdul is based mostly on conjecture (Tolkien's work on the dwarves' language is very limited), but it's good enough for my purposes. Bakhâl means "fighter;" I thought it was a likely name choice for a dwarf, and was my favorite of the options I came up with.
> 
> I got the idea that Bilbo would return the white stones to Thranduil from one of The Tolkien Professor's podcasts (his review of Battle of Five Armies, I believe). It was suggested Bilbo might return the gems, since in the book he gives a necklace of silver and pearl to the Elvenking as thanks for the "hospitality" of the elves while Bilbo was invisibly burgling them during his stay in Mirkwood. I highly recommend the podcast; it's run by Corey Olsen, a medieval scholar who really knows his Tolkien well. His commentary on both the books and movies is very thoughtful and insightful.


	19. Chapter 19

Kíli and Tauriel had laughed, afterwards, at how awkwardly the betrothal feast had begun.  Everyone had been on their best behavior—indeed, painfully so.  At first, neither her family nor his had known what to say to the other, and there had been a lot of awkward staring and bowing, as well as small-talk that seemed largely at cross purposes.  The dwarves had not known how to answer remarks about the color of this autumn’s leaves and the elves had been equally perplexed by the dwarves’ observations that the mineral content in the forest hills was quite promising.

Nonetheless, Tauriel’s parents had very politely introduced themselves to Balin, Dwalin, and Daín, Gloín, and Ori, whom Kíli had brought to represent his family at this meeting of their houses.  Thankfully, no-one had seemed offended that his mother had remained at home according to the customary protectiveness which the dwarves showed their women.

Formal greetings concluded, Tauriel and Kíli had declared their intention to be wed and exchanged the silver rings that symbolized their troth.  

The atmosphere had relaxed somewhat once the feast had begun and the wine was passed.  Tauriel was grateful for Silwen, whose easy familiarity had helped lead the interactions between the two houses.  There had been a confused moment when Gilfaron had wondered if the toast “May your ears grow ever longer” was meant as an insult or not, but on the whole, things had gone off rather well.  

“Thank you for doing this for me,” Tauriel told Kíli when they were alone.  “And now you needn’t pretend you’re not relieved it’s over.”  She smiled conspiratorially.  “You’re not the only one.”

He chuckled.  “I think our families will get along, as soon as they stop being confused by each other.”  After a moment, he added, “You know, we’re twice betrothed, so I think that means we have to be twice married, don’t you?”

“I suppose it must.  Make me your dwarf bride and I shall have you my elf lord,” she agreed.  “You realize that as my betrothed you have the right to escort me to the Feast of Starlight tomorrow.  Will you?”

“Proudly.”

Tauriel felt the new weight of the solid silver ring on his hand as he caught her neck and drew himself up to kiss her.  She knew Kíli had once been embarrassed that he had to reach to meet her lips, as if doing so had made his desire all too obvious, but now the action seemed as unconscious as breathing.  She found she liked the way he had to pull her to him, for it made the gesture somewhat urgent, immediate, a reminder to value each moment they had been given.

“I love you,” she whispered, and he echoed the words back to her.

* * *

“So this is what it’s like for you every day in Erebor.”  Kíli gazed around the vast halls, which were crowded with elves wearing their finest.  “I don’t think I’ve been giving you enough credit for courage.”

“If it’s too overwhelming, I’m sure your old cell is still open,” Tauriel suggested teasingly.

“Would I get you all to myself?”

She shook her head.  “I’m staying here, but I’d send you a minstrel to keep you company!”  

“Well, in that case—” Kíli linked his arm in hers and let her lead him down into the hall.

He had never seen so many lanterns.  There were amber and green ones strung among the carved pillars of the hall, giving everything a warm glow.  Higher, in the far vault of the ceiling, smaller lights shone in blue and silver and red.

And the people!  He thought he had seen all there was to know of elves during their stay in Rivendell.  Elrond’s folk had been quiet and reserved before their dwarven guests; they had spoken little—though they had been generous and polite—and had left Kíli and his friends mostly to themselves.  Kíli had supposed elves must always be so aloof even amongst their own kind, but here he saw he had been mistaken.  These people were talking and laughing—indeed, making quite as merry as any dwarves or even the humans that he had seen.  They were maybe a little more refined about it, but Kíli could not doubt they were having a very good time.

There was plenty of good food and drink, as he soon discovered: little game pies, roast venison, and smoked salmon, some mushrooms that Kíli was not quite sure he trusted the look of, and lots of acorn bannocks to mop up the juices and wash everything down.  For desert, there were candied nuts and apple tarts topped with pastry leaves.  And of course, there had been wine, and crisp cider, and a mead brewed with the summer’s last crop of blackberries.

Kíli was finishing a third apple tart when the music, which had filled the hall since they arrived, clearly changed from subtle background notes to a more insistent dancing beat.  Tauriel gave him an eager smile.  “Are you ready to learn some elvish dances?”

“Of course!” He brushed the last pastry crumbs from his fingers and took her hand.  

Tauriel found Silwen already partnered with Voronwë on the dancing floor, and she and Kíli joined them to make the set of partners that the dance required.  The dance’s balanced, parallel figures proved rather less intricate than they had first looked, and after several repeats of the pattern, Kíli had grasped the basic movements well enough to take his attention off his own feet and flash Tauriel a smile.  

Her answering look of happiness told him how much it meant to her that he was at her side to celebrate this festival among her own people, and Kíli suddenly stopped caring what anyone would think if he missed a step or forgot a figure.  Let the rest think him a fool if they wanted; he had all the approval he needed from her eyes alone.

They danced a second set with another couple, and then Tauriel had traded him to another partner, a young elf woman who regarded him with silent curiosity, but who proved an excellent lead in the unfamiliar dance.  When it was over, she favored him with a shy smile.  “Your majesty dances quite well,” she said with a curtsey, and then, blushing, had let her previous partner claim her again.  

Kíli chuckled to himself, remembering how he had spent the whole of his stay in Rivendell trying to elicit a smile from the dark-eyed harpist, who had resolutely ignored him to the end.  He’d told himself she was too embarrassed to acknowledge his charm, which was better than supposing she had found him thoroughly repellent.  If anything, his failure then had prompted him to take a more proactive approach with the lovely red-headed guard captain of Mirkwood.  He wasn’t sure if this maiden now had found him pleasant or just unusual, but her self-conscious courtesy had reminded Kíli just how monumentally audacious he’d really been to try for any elf-girl’s attention.

He had danced next with Silwen, and then the two of them had agreed they needed a drink.  As they were turning back to the dance floor with their glasses, Kíli noticed that Tauriel was partnered with the blond elven prince.  

The dance was a slower one, and Legolas was speaking to her as he led her through the steps.  Their earnest conversation and their ignorance of the people about them gave their dance an unusual intimacy.  Kíli noted unhappily how Legolas’s hand rested at her waist, then on her arm.

Tauriel had said Legolas was like the brother she had always wanted, Kíli tried to tell himself.  And yet, that thought only made him more annoyed because it reminded him that Legolas had already known Tauriel longer than Kíli ever would, and that the elf would still be there after Kíli was gone. That was what really nettled him: it was not enough that Legolas should expect to have the rest of eternity with her, but he had to be at her side now, as if he were mocking Kíli with that fact.  If Kíli weren’t supposed to behave like a king, he’d show that smug prince just what he thought.

He sighed and finished his glass of cider at a single draught.  Looking up, he saw Silwen watching him, her expression slightly concerned.  

“Um, I’m fine,” he said awkwardly as she glanced past him at her friend and the prince.  He felt, then, how unreasonable he’d been.  “Let’s get another drink.”  He took her arm in his and lead her back to the taproom.

* * *

“I’m glad I could see you tonight,” Legolas told Tauriel as he turned her under his arm.  When her eyes met his again, he continued.  “I’m leaving in the morning, and I can’t say when I will be back.”

Tauriel nearly faltered in her next step.  “Leaving the Greenwood? For where?”

He could only nod before she turned aside to weave about the other couple in their set.  

 _Where will you go?_ It was the question she was grateful Thranduil’s pardon had saved her from asking.  Though for her, there had been someone who would have given her the answer she needed: Kíli had already asked her to follow him.  But Legolas had no-one to follow, and she was half afraid he was running from her because he could not bear to see her with someone else.  The thought bothered her, though she could not say if it was for guilt, or sadness, or some other reason.

Legolas had said nothing about her betrothal, though Tauriel knew he had noticed her ring immediately.  Indeed, each time their hands met, his hand seemed awkward in hers, as if the slender band of silver had changed the feel of her hand or made it belong to someone else.

“I’m riding for Imladris,” Legolas explained when she rejoined him.  “I want to make it before the snows close the mountain pass.”

 _Why?_ she wanted to ask, but was afraid to know the answer.

He smiled slightly, as if reading the question in her face.  “You showed me there is a world beyond our borders and that it matters what passes there.  I can’t stay here any more than you can.”

Tauriel flushed; so he admitted it was to do with her.

“Surely your father does not approve,” she said when the dance next permitted.

Legolas’s smile was complete this time.  “Surprisingly, he sends me with his blessing.”

Tauriel regarded him wonderingly.  “Your father has changed since that day on the battlefield.”

“Have not we all?” he asked tonelessly.

Tauriel dropped her eyes from his, hurt as if by an accusation.

They parted to allow their partners to take a turn between them.  

“I give you joy on your betrothal,” Legolas said as he moved to her side.  When he took her hand again, he held it with a gentle, steady pressure so that she looked back to his face at last.  His eyes were clouded, and she could not guess if his earlier remark had been an intentional gibe or not.  “I do not think I shall see your wedding, but I wish you a happy one.”  She could tell the words were hard for him.

“Thank you,” Tauriel managed after a moment.  She wanted to believe he was not merely making up for the offense—of course he meant what he said now—but she was still stung by his words that had been carelessly or clumsily spoken.  

They had reached the end of the dance pattern and the music faded, but Legolas did not release her hands.  

“Forgive me, Tauriel,” he said, and still he held her as the couples about them broke up. “I l—  I leave you now.”  He bowed over her hand, and left her without looking back at her face.  

* * *

Tauriel stood for a moment in the confusion of the dance floor, watching Legolas’s retreating back and wanting to scream.  

After a few moments, she turned about, somewhat bewildered, and looked for Kíli.  He was no longer among the dancing couples, and it took her some minutes to find him and Silwen near the taproom drinking cider. Kíli’s expression lightened noticeably when he saw her approaching, and he left his glass and came to her, taking her hands.

“Tauriel, you look miserable,” he said sympathetically.

“I— Legolas—”  She sighed, exasperated, not sure she wanted to explain.  Kíli’s eyes were so warm as they met hers.  “Well, he’s an ass,” she finished impulsively.  

Kíli breathed a laugh and then looked embarrassed.

“What?” Tauriel prompted, curiosity momentarily overcoming her frustration.

“Oh, nothing, I—” Kíli began evasively, then catching the true distress still hiding behind her look, he went on, “I was feeling jealous of him just now.”

“Oh, Kíli!”  A smile broke over her face.  “You mustn’t!”  She squeezed his hands.  “No one else will ever have what I am giving you.”  

He smiled up at her, self conscious.  “I know.  I’m afraid we dwarves are prone to be jealous without cause.”

Tauriel nudged his cheek fondly.  “You do no worse than any elf.”

* * *

 The night had ended in singing.  The lanterns of gold and green which had lit the hall suddenly faded and went out, leaving the smaller lights in the high vaulted ceiling twinkling like a sky full of stars. The revelers had all fallen silent, listening to the voices, sometimes single, sometimes in chorus, that now drifted through the halls from somewhere unseen.  

Kíli had never heard elvish voices in songs quite like this, haunting and clear and filled with images he could almost, but not quite, glimpse.  Tauriel whispered to tell him what the songs were about: the elves’ earliest memories of a lake and a sky both filled with stars, the long years of their youth in twilight before the lighting of sun and moon, and a mariner who sailed with a sacred jewel on his brow.  Kíli listened, entranced and overcome by the fair voices that told of beauty from a time before his own forefathers had woken beneath the stone.  He remembered stories from his own childhood, of the dangers to folk who chanced upon elvish singing and were caught by its spell, never after to find joy in their own lives.  There was little exaggeration to the tale, he decided; he did not think he would ever forget this music.  

The elves all around him joined their voices in the final song, which he later learned had been a hymn to Elbereth, the kindler of the stars.  Kíli gazed on Tauriel in wonder and delight.  Her upturned face reflected the soft glow of the distant lanterns, though her eyes seemed filled with some other, fairer light; and Kíli felt, more keenly than ever before, how little worthy he was to aspire to a creature so lovely and so high above him.  _She walks in starlight in another world,_ he’d said once, and he knew it was true.  

And then she glanced down at him, and when she sang, he knew it was to him.  He still did not understand the words, but he felt them lift him to that place where she was and include him in the vision of sacred light.  

Kíli felt tears on his face, but he did not brush them away.  

* * *

The two of them had made their way back from the feast in silence.  Near Kíli’s door, they had paused, hand in hand, and after some time, Kíli had said, “I feel quite drunk on elvish magic.”  

Tauriel laughed gently.  “Tonight was a heady vintage.”

“Thank you.”

“Happy birthday,” she said, and kissed him, long and soft.

“Good night.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The obligatory BBC romance ballroom drama, complete with awkward love triangle. XD
> 
> Fili may be too traumatized to ever eat apples again, but obviously that's not Kili's problem.


	20. Chapter 20

If he’d had nothing to consult but his own wishes, Kíli would have married her the next summer, when their betrothal would have stood the requisite year.  But he knew that before he took a queen—and an elf, at that—he needed to take time to establish his kingship, to let his people see him rule well.  He even knew he’d be happier and more confident in his rule if he waited.  Of course it was the better choice.  But that knowledge did not make the waiting easy.  

Tauriel was to return and plant more saplings on the mountain slopes in the spring, but on the whole, the two of them had agreed to see less of each other in the time before their wedding.  He could not have it said she was a distraction to him, nor could he be accused of spending too much time away from the mountain in these first years of his reign.  Kíli would not return to the Greenwood until he went to collect his bride and bring her home.  

And so, somewhat reluctantly, he had promised to come for her on midsummer’s day a year and a half after their elvish betrothal.  Tauriel had laughed and reminded him that it was the shortest night of the year, but he had promised her that under the mountain, no one cared what time the sun came up.  

* * *

 Kíli’s days had been full when he returned to Erebor.  Shortly after he arrived, there had been Durin’s day to celebrate, and then in December, he had helped plan a memorial celebration for the dwarves who had died retaking their home.  Kíli was determined that Thorin and Fíli and all their fallen brothers would not be forgotten so long as his kingdom lasted.  When spring came, there was also his own coronation anniversary to be remembered.

And in between all these memorials and celebrations, there was the simple, hard work of managing a kingdom.  Kíli learned how to rule, balancing the advice of his own counselors and discovering when to concede and when to stand his ground.  He was also learning how to bear the weight of the eyes always on him, and even, sometimes to invite their gaze, though that was most frightening of all.

Thankfully, he was expected to lead his people’s industry by his own, and he had his very own workshop were he labored, sometimes alone, but more often with others, innovating and perfecting the crafts which would make Erebor’s smiths famous once more.  Indeed, some of his happiest times during that year and a half were spent in his shop, toiling over the casting of some intricate ornament or testing a new alloy for a sword.  In the forge, there was no show required beyond sweat and hard work; he didn’t have to pretend to an assurance he did not always feel.  He knew what he was doing, with gold and silver, iron and steel in his hands, and his confidence showed itself without effort.  Perhaps some day, ruling would be the same.  

He did not miss Tauriel during the day, with so many things requiring his attention.  And his evenings were usually spent with his family—his mother and all the cousins, young and old, who had been part of his life since he was a boy in the Blue Mountains.  But at night, when he was alone in his rooms, he was free to think of her, free to miss her.

Kíli would not have said he was unhappy without her.  His new life was finally assuming a comfortable familiarity, and he was surrounded by the people he loved.  But that was just it: she was the one missing piece, the beloved one not yet at his side.  His happiness would not truly be complete until she had joined him.

Sometimes as he lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, Kíli imagined himself telling her what he had done that day.  He would guess what sort of things would have surprised her or made her laugh.  He very much missed her laugh.  Then he would fall asleep and dream of her, only to wake and find the weight in his arms nothing more than his heavy fur-lined coverlet.

* * *

 Tauriel surprised herself by feeling something near to impatience over those next seventeen months as she waited for Kíli.  She wasn’t used to wishing time would pass more quickly.  And really, it wasn’t that the days went too slowly.  It was just that, for the first time, she felt she was in the wrong place.  No, not the wrong place.  She just wasn’t in the right place, her place.  

Her awareness of her bond to Kíli had grown slowly since that one reckless, wonderful moment when she had laid hold of his spirit and drawn him back from the brink of death.  She had come to realize that their lives had been decided then. Although their love had flourished very quickly by both their peoples’ standards, there would have been no reason to delay their wedding had he not been king.  They were already sealed for each other.  

She supposed their bond was what made the waiting so difficult. In the ordinary way of things, only marriage could link two souls as theirs had been.  Wedded, they would have been joined in both spirit and body; the one union was not meant to be without the other.  She longed to be at his side, sharing her life with him and supporting him in deed as much as she did in spirit.

When she was trying to sleep, sometimes she would feel his absence like a nearly physical ache.  Then she would go to the mess hall and drink wine with friends just off the midnight watch, or take her bow and daggers and range the forest paths alone.  Once she had even helped refill all the lanterns that hung in the lower halls. Anything was better than lying in bed and counting the days till he would fill that empty place in the darkness beside her.

And so, for the first time, the Greenwood no longer felt like her home.  

Legolas’s departure had something to do with that feeling, as well.  It wasn’t simply that she missed him, though of course she did—he’d been her friend for much of her life.  But she was upset that he had left unresolved hurt and disappointment between them.  She could forgive him his disappointment, but it seemed he could not forgive her for having chosen a dwarf.  Probably it was better than he would not see her with Kíli, but it hurt that he had left her on a note of insult and misunderstanding.  At their last meeting, Legolas had very nearly told her he loved her, she was sure.  Did he think his love meant she should not be offended by anything else he had said?  Tauriel knew she must let go of her hurt, and, indeed, with the passing seasons, her frustration faded, replaced by her growing hope for her new life with Kíli.  But even so, she could not erase what had passed between herself and her old friend.

That year and more, she spent most of her time with her family, knowing that soon they would see less of her.  The absence would not be a great hardship for an elf; families, and even long-married couples, did not spend their whole lives in constant company.  They led separate lives and then united once more as their desires and interests led them.  But Tauriel wanted her parents to feel that she had not replaced or forsaken them in her affections, though she was leaving them for now.  And they seemed to understand.  Indeed, her mother and grandmother spent many hours that second winter sewing her a wedding gown.  

And so the winter had softened at last into spring, and spring had warmed to summer, and then Kíli came back.

* * *

 Kíli had returned in time for Tauriel’s birthday once again, and the celebration had been as much for their reunion as it was for her.  He had brought all of his close family this time, including his mother, who wasn’t about to miss her son’s elvish wedding.  Even Frey had come, not only from kinship to Kíli but for her friendship of Tauriel. The occasion had been quite boisterous and merry; all past constraint was quite overwhelmed in the excitement and anticipation of the upcoming wedding.  

There had been much toasting and even more music, both elven and dwarven.  Kíli had again produced his fiddle, and he and his companions had offered Tauriel quite a few rollicking tunes.  In return, the dwarven musicians had insisted that she and Kíli demonstrate some proper elvish dances, a favor which ought to have proved more embarrassing to them than it truly did, since they both seemed to be paying far less attention to the steps than they were to each other.  

All in all, both their families seemed to have enjoyed one another, and Tauriel was no longer concerned that the wedding would be awkward and uncomfortable.

* * *

 Once the last glass had been drained and the final blessings offered, Tauriel and Kíli were left alone at last.  Crickets sang in the empty clearing and from the woods beyond it, the sound quiet and peaceful after the recent riot of laughter and music.  Most of the lanterns had been extinguished, their warm glow replaced by the pale light of the waxing moon.  

“I missed the way you smell,” Kíli said, coming behind her and burying his face in her hair as he hugged her.

“What?”  Tauriel laughed.  

“Maybe you elves don’t notice it with each other.  But you smell wonderful.”

He held her tight, and she gasped happily as he crushed the breath from her lungs.  

“I never could get your smell quite right in my dreams. And I dreamt of you, well, a lot,” he continued.  

“Every night?” she asked.

“Maybe not every night.  I had to leave some time for the dream that I’m holding audience in the throne room when I discover I’ve forgot my crown.  And my pants.”

She giggled.  “I missed you, _meleth nîn_.  Sometimes too much to dream.”  She turned in his arms and kissed him.  

“Tell me, are we supposed to wait till after both weddings to be properly husband and wife?” Kíli asked after a bit.  There was to be a dwarven ceremony when they returned to Erebor.

“Well,” Tauriel reasoned slowly, “we elves hold that the wedding is only accomplished by bodily union.  Everything else is just ceremony and courtesy.  You and I could run away tonight, if we wanted, and the marriage would be just as valid.”

Kíli smiled.  “I don’t think I’m really in a position to go about offending whole neighboring kingdoms by flouting their laws and customs.  We’d better have the ceremony, too.”

“You are a wise king,” Tauriel teased him solemnly, a smile tugging the edges of her lips.

“I’m learning.”  He lifted her hands from his shoulders and clasped them in his.  “Wait here and close your eyes.  I have to get your gift.”

“Oh?” she said as she obeyed him.  

“We’ll, I’d hardly be a dwarf if I didn’t make you something.”  His voice was partway across the clearing now.  “It’s purely practical, I’m afraid.  Just something I knew you’d be able to use.”

He was before her again and slipped something into her hands.

Tauriel felt a narrow hoop of cool metal.  She turned it in her hands, eyes still closed.  It seemed to be made of interwoven bands, and the outer surface was set with gems.

Her mouth lifted in a smile.  “Kíli, is this...?”  

“You can look,” he prompted.

She opened her eyes, looked from the crown in her hands to his face.  “You said I’ll need this?”

“Of course!  A bride gains legal rights to all her husband’s property, and that includes ranks and titles.  You’re going to be my queen.”

Tauriel laughed softly.  

“What?”

“Me, a queen: that’s the most astonishing thing.  Not that I’m marrying in two days time; not that you’re a dwarf.”  She traced her fingers over the woven silver bands.  “You’ve done beautiful work, as always.”

The crown had the same interlinked diamond motif as Kíli’s own, though the form was softer and more organic.  The gems were moonstones.  

“I want to see if it fits.”  He gestured for her to put it on.

Tauriel lifted it, then paused.  “I don’t—”  She handed it to him.  “You should do it.  I feel much too presumptuous!”  She knelt before him.

Kíli smoothed her hair back and settled the crown over her head; it sat low over her temples, like a circlet.  “Maybe it could...”  He gazed at her, apparently unaware that he had left his thought unfinished.  “You look perfect,” he said finally.  

Tauriel carefully fingered the crown on her brow, but left it in place.  “I’m glad you’re back,” she said simply, and laid her head against his chest.  She liked being the one to lean on him, for once.  “I don’t think I could have stayed away much longer.  You were tugging on my very soul.”  She clenched her fingers in the back of his shirt, and he gasped slightly at the fierceness of her grip.

“I’m not going to leave you again,” he said, his voice a soft rumble that she felt as much as heard.

“Good; I’ll hold you to that.”


	21. Chapter 21

On his wedding day, Kíli woke to a chorus of snores.  He cautiously pushed blankets aside  to reveal the rather alarming sight of his cousin Thorin’s sleeping face.  Shifting, he found himself pinned on the other side by Dwalin’s massive shoulders.  

He sighed, resigned, but not really surprised.  Last night he had hosted a celebration for his friends and kinsmen, as was customary for the groom on the eve of his wedding.  The festivities were really more for the friends than for the groom; it was something of a last hurrah of brotherhood and hospitality before the soon-to-be-husband owed himself (and his property) to his wife.  Kíli really couldn’t throw a proper party here, when lodging and refreshments were not truly his; he’d have a bigger feast before his dwarvish wedding in Erebor.  But everyone had descended on his rooms last night nevertheless, and there had been a great deal of drinking and smoking, as well as the expected amount of teasing.

Kíli didn’t really remember how he’d gotten to bed; he supposed it was something of a wonder he’d actually made it there; the other half of the party was presumably still laid out on the floor of the common room.  He didn’t have a hangover, thank Mahal and a sturdy dwarvish constitution.  He’d have been sorry to spend his wedding day feeling wretched; he wanted to enjoy every moment of it.  Well, every moment that he was with Tauriel.  Being surrounded by snoring kinsmen wasn’t something he felt he needed to savor.  He was suddenly glad he would be spending tonight in _her_ rooms; he really couldn’t imagine her lovely head resting on that pillow after Thorin had been drooling on it.  

It should have been Fíli there, he realized with a brief pang.  At any rate, Fíli would have made it easier to get up; Kíli would simply have pushed his brother off the bed onto the floor.    
As it was, Kíli carefully crawled out from between the sleeping bodies of Dwalin and Thorin and stepped cautiously over Ori, who lay curled between the others’ feet.

In the common room, Nori, Bofur, and Gloin lay sprawled on the rug, while Bomber had claimed the whole elf-sized sofa.  Kíli grinned to himself and made his way out to bathe.  

The bath house was small, but it had a real bathing pool, unlike the fountain he and the rest of the company had claimed in Rivendell.  He supposed they really should have known better, but then they’d be too carried away by comfort and respite from their recent dangers to really consider propriety.  At any rate, they’d certainly given the Rivendell elves an eyeful.

As he undressed, he found himself wondering—not for the first time—what Tauriel would think of him.  She’d seen him almost naked once, when Oin had asked her to look at his mending wound, and she hadn’t seemed repulsed.  He knew better than to think she didn’t find him physically attractive; he’d never doubted that since the first time she had really kissed him.  But he knew he was surely no elf.  He didn’t think that was what she wanted from him, but still, he felt a little nervous.  He didn’t want her to be...what?  Disappointed?  

The water was cold—apparently, the elves valued a bracing dip in the mornings—but there was a small steam room and he sat there for a while in his towel, enjoying the smell from the heated cedar benches.

He was gathering his clothes and congratulating himself on having finished before the others had arrived and subjected him to more teasing (or worse), when the door burst open.

“Finished already?” Dwalin demanded.  “Y’re gettin’ married today, lad, and ye know she’ll never have ye if y’re not clean.”  

Thorin came in behind him, a mischievous smile breaking steadily over his face, and Kíli knew it was too late.  His younger cousin barreled towards him, and Kíli didn’t even have time to drop his bundled clothing before Thorin caught him about the middle and dragged him back into the chilly water.

Kíli hadn’t been allowed to escape until he’d been given a very thorough dunking, but there was consolation in the knowledge that he’d given back as good as he’d received.

His rooms were empty when he returned.  He hung up the wet clothes and dressed in the elvish wedding attire Tauriel had given him.  He still didn’t know what she would be wearing, though surely it would complement the soft browns and rich greens of his tunic and pants.

Elvish clothing was rather more tailored than Kíli was used to, but it was comfortable and fit him well.  The design was formal, yet understated, its elegance more in the cut than in any ornamentation.  A delicate vining motif had been embroidered over the tunic, but from a distance, it showed more as a subtle texture than a pattern.  There were a few small beads of amber about the collar, which made him feel quite clever about the pair of amber earrings he’d had sent to Tauriel’s room this morning.  Kili felt he was gaining a feel for the elven aesthetic.

After combing his wet—and now very clean—hair, Kíli decided to leave it unbraided.  A simple look seemed best for today, and he suspected Tauriel liked his hair loose, anyhow.  At least, she tended to play with it when it wasn’t braided, and that was what he liked.  Perhaps that wasn’t fair of him, he thought, and then grinned as he reminded himself that after today, it didn’t matter what he did to steal her attention, since he would soon have her all to himself.

* * *

_I’m marrying him today._

The thought had been Tauriel’s first upon waking and she had lain still for perhaps a quarter of an hour in happy contemplation of that simple fact.  She was truly joining Kíli at last.  She would be his, and they would make one life together of the time they had been given.  The knowledge that that time would eventually end did not frighten her.   She was sure of one thing: no matter what came, it would always be good to have loved Kíli.  

Once she rose, there had been plenty to occupy her attention, but still that glowing sense of happiness had hovered over her thoughts as she ate breakfast, bathed, and dressed.  

Kíli’s gift had arrived while her mother was braiding her hair.  

“For Mistress Tauriel, from His Majesty,” the elven messenger had said and handed her a small silver box.  For a moment, Tauriel had not been sure which king had been meant, but when she opened the case to find the amber earrings, she knew it was from Kíli.  She recognized his work.  

“Kíli has a generous heart and a good eye,” Calimîreth remarked as Tauriel slipped on the earrings.  “Did you tell him the colors of your gown?”

Tauriel smiled.  “No, Nana.  You must give him all the credit for guessing well.”  It was true; the rich amber stones went perfectly with the mellow golden yellow of the dress which hung against the wall, waiting for her.

Her mother bound off a last braid and readied the dress for Tauriel to step into it.  

The gown laced up the middle of her back, from hips to shoulders, and Tauriel had a brief moment of panic regarding how she was possibly going to unfasten it herself before she realized how ridiculous her concern was.  Independent and practical, she wasn’t used to needing help dressing, or indeed, to having anyone to help her.  

As if noticing the momentary tension in her daughter’s shoulders, Calimîreth laughed softly. “You love him and trust him, and you’ll quickly learn to rely on him.”  She placed a kiss at the base of her daughter’s neck.  “You’re not supposed to be able to take this off by yourself,” she teased gently, tugging the laces into a knot.  

Tauriel said nothing, but flushed at her own reflection in the mirror.  She almost did not recognize herself.   Her mother had done her hair in soft, loose braids that framed her face and fell over her shoulders.  This wasn’t hair that was tamed and held out of the way, but careless, gentle, and begging to be touched. Her gown was made from layers of airy crepe that her mother and grandmother had painstakingly embroidered with leaves and blossoms in threads of a darker shade of gold.  Its cut was simple, drawing no attention to itself but following the lines of her figure, and her waist was clasped by a wide green girdle the same color as the emerald pendant on her breast.  

_Of course,_ Tauriel thought, _Kíli would have guessed I would match my gown to his gift._

Calimîreth surveyed her fondly.  “Valar bless you, my dear Thalind.  While I do not yet fully understand the fate that drew you together, I can see that you need to be with him.  There were nights this winter when I was sure you would start up from your chair and walk all the way to Erebor.”  

Tauriel colored more deeply.  “Was it that obvious?”  She glanced down at Kíli’s betrothal ring on her hand.  “My heart, my _fae_ , have been with him since I chose him.  I have to follow.”

Calimîreth embraced her daughter.  “I would give you every happiness, if I could,” she told Tauriel.  “Yet I know doing so is outside my power, and you must find it for yourself.  I do not think Kíli is unworthy of your love.”

“Oh Nana, thank you,” Tauriel whispered. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kili's gifts of amber and moonstones (in this and the previous chapter) just might be the result of my own fascination with those and other semi-precious gems. ;) I'm not so into precious stones, but I love anything with clouds and flaws that reflect the light from under the surface, like Kili's labradorite runestone. I totally understand the elves' and dwarves' love for shiny rocks. :D


	22. Chapter 22

The wedding was to take place outdoors, on a high, flat spur of ground sheltered by a great oak tree.  The place looked out over deep wooded ravines that stretched into the distance like the mountain halls Kíli knew, but filled with green-golden light.  

It was really to be more celebration than ceremony, and the area had been set for a feast.  Two high seats had been placed among tree’s winding roots for the bride and groom, and the rest of the guests—both his family and hers—were already spread among the tables below.  There were flowers everywhere: along the tables and benches, wreathed around the tree, and trailing from the branches.  Kíli could name a few—golden and purple sunflowers, sprays of lacy white hemlock, some blue phlox—but there were far more in every color whose names he had never known.  He made a note to ask, some time.

Everything was ready; they all simply waited for her.

Kíli had been helping Ori explain to Frey what he’d had to endure that morning from his kinsmen when he saw Tauriel across the clearing and forgot what he was saying.  

She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and she was here today for him.

Ori smiled as Kíli fumbled for his lost thought.  “Go on,” Ori urged, and gave Kíli a push towards his bride.  

“And close your mouth!” Frey called after him.

* * *

  
“I think I’m dreaming,” Kíli said as he gazed up at Tauriel.  “I’m going to wake up on the scorched beach of Esgaroth with a pain in my leg, and you’ll be gone.”

“I assure you, this is not a dream,” she said and kissed his brow.  “And even if it were, I could hardly leave you.  I should be a very poor healer indeed to cure you of one hurt, only to inflict another.”

Kíli grinned.  “ _Le mellon_ , Tauriel.”

She leaned forward and kissed his lips, her hair falling down around him.

“Your majesty,” came Silwen’s voice.  Kíli turned to see the young elf regarding them with a barely concealed smile.  “I have your crown.”  She held up a braided circlet of golden flowers. 

As she placed it on his head, he realized that everyone had turned to watch them.  Silwen next crowned Tauriel with white blossoms.  

Calimîreth approached Tauriel and took her daughter’s right hand, as Dwalin came up behind Kíli and did the same.  Then together, Calimîreth and Dwalin joined Tauriel and Kíli’s hands and held them clasped between their own, Calimîreth’s slender hand and Dwalin’s big tattooed one.

“May Elbereth witness the will of my daughter,” Calimîreth said.

“And may Aran Einior witness the will of my son,” Dwalin echoed her.  Kíli smiled at the sound of the elvish words in Dwalin’s rough voice.  There had been no doubt who he had wanted to take his father’s role in the elvish ceremony.  Dwalin had known him from a lad, and, like Thorin, had often stood in for the father Kíli had lost.

Tauriel met Kíli’s eyes with a steady, earnest gaze.  “Kíli, I join myself to you, body and soul, in the name of Eru Allfather,” she said softly.  

 “And by the name of Eru Allfather, I join myself to you, Tauriel, in soul and body,” he returned.  He was glad there was nothing more complicated to say; he wasn’t sure he could have remembered anything more with her joyful face shining down on him.  Those words, though simple, were enough to express their purpose today: the Allfather’s name was seldom invoked and held far more authority than any longer oath could have.

“I give you the blessing of myself and Gilfaron and all our house,” Calimîreth promised, and glancing aside, Kíli saw the true affection in her face as she looked on them together.

Dwalin crushed their hands momentarily in his.  “Mahal’s and Durin’s blessings on ye both, lad, Tauriel.”  Then he and Calimîreth released the couple’s hands.  

Kíli looked down from Tauriel’s eyes to her fingers in his.  He still clearly remembered those first few times they had touched; then, he’d simply been glad she hadn’t flinched or drawn back.  This moment was far beyond his early wild hopes.

They were not to exchange rings today; the casting of rings was a central part of the dwarvish wedding ceremony, and so their silver betrothal bands would suffice for a few days more.  

Kíli finally had to loose Tauriel’s hand to accept a goblet of mead from Gilfaron.  Kíli drank from it and then offered it to Tauriel to drink as well.  Then he kissed her once more for good measure, and their assembled families cheered.

The two made their way to their seats of honor and the celebration was begun.  As lord and lady of the feast, they were waited on by all their guests, who had staunchly refused to let them fetch anything for themselves.  Such privileges reminded him of being a new king, Kíli decided, only he enjoyed them more now, since he had someone to share them with.  

There was music once the meal was done, and Tauriel and Kíli even persuaded the other dwarves to join in the elvish dances this time.  Kíli felt quite magnanimous for sharing his new bride with the others.  He really wanted nothing more than to have her completely to himself, and he carefully watched the last sunlight as its angle slanted down towards the west.  As was the custom, he and Tauriel were only expected to remain at the feast until sundown.  Why, exactly, had he chosen the very longest day of the year for the wedding?  

“I think it’s twilight now,” he had whispered to Tauriel as they had partnered each other in a dance.  

She answered him with a teasing look.  “Twilight but not dusk,” she corrected and whirled away among the other dancers.

“Aren’t they the same thing?” he protested when the steps brought them back together.  

She shook her head.  “Dusk has more night in it.”

Tauriel had put him off for two more dances.  Lanterns were being lit and Kíli was beginning to consider finding himself another glass of wine, when Tauriel slipped through the dancing couples to his side, caught his hand, and tugged him away beyond the festive clearing and into the quiet of the trees.  

She drew him in a brief chase, and Kíli followed her blindly, trusting she knew these woods well enough not to run him into a tree or drop him down a ditch.  Then suddenly she drew him to a halt against her in the forest gloom.

“Where are we?” Kíli asked after he had caught his breath.

“Home.” 

* * *

Tauriel was happy, purely and completely happy.  All day, the feeling had been growing in her, and now, standing here alone with Kíli, she felt her heart on the verge of breaking with more joy than she could contain.  

They had stopped beneath a spreading maple, and Tauriel drew on a cord that hung a little above her head.  A wooden stair descended smoothly and silently before them.  

“You live in a tree!”  Kíli looked up at her, delight on his face.  “You didn’t tell me you lived in a tree.”

“Where else would I live?”

“Um, a fairy palace of clouds and moonlight?” he suggested doubtfully.

She shook her head, pretending to scold him.

“No,” he agreed.  “Maybe a giant mushroom?”

Tauriel laughed until she had to lean against him for support.  He held her quite steady, but when she had caught her breath, he said somewhat apologetically, “While I’m more than able to carry you, I don’t think your elvish stairs were designed with dwarf porters in mind.”

“Oh.  Yes,” she murmured against him, and took her feet again.  He released her reluctantly, nonetheless, and followed her up the solid, if somewhat narrow, stair.

“You’ve everything up here,” he said wonderingly when they reached the main platform of the tree house.  There was a single circular room, built round the tree and partially enclosed with gabled openings to allow the branches passage.  Around them were chairs, rugs, a table, shelves—everything he was used to in his own comfortable rooms at home.  He’d just never expected to find those things nestled amongst branches and leaves.  Kíli followed her around to the back of the platform, into an area that seemed to be a parlor; there were several comfortable cushioned chairs and a couch.  The only thing he hadn’t seen was a bed.  She didn’t sleep in a hammock, did she?  He remembered hearing some people did, and hoped it wasn’t elves.

“What?”  Tauriel paused, as if sensing some hesitance on his part.  “You haven’t discovered your long-mislaid reverence for me at last?”

“Hardly.”  He caught her and drew her against him.  “I don’t have to apologize anymore for taking liberties when I hold you,” he said, his voice muffled by her bodice.  

“You never have apologized,” she corrected.

“Well, I always thought probably I should.”  He pressed his lips to her breastbone.  “But I was afraid then you’d have to ask me to stop.”

“If you’d done as you are doing now, I surely would have,” she said, and drew him up to meet her own lips.

Kíli leaned into her and Tauriel stepped back, caught off-balance. He put out his hand to catch them both against the tapestried wall behind her, but to his surprise, the tapestry gave way on nothing and they fell sprawling atop what proved to be more stairs, winding up among the central branches of the tree.  

Before Kíli could ask if Tauriel were hurt, she had pulled him down to kiss her again.

“That’s an old dwarf technique for finding hidden doors,” he explained breathlessly.  “But it’s not always easy to find a willing elf maid, so sometimes we have to resort to knocking thrushes and autumn moons.”

She giggled.  Of course she knew the story.

Once they had regained their feet, Tauriel drew him up the stairs.  

They came up into a wide chamber under a high, gabled roof.  There was a wardrobe and dressing table at one end, and at the other, a large, intricately carved bed.

Kíli laughed softly.  “I was half afraid to find you slept perched on a branch.”

Tauriel gave him a peculiar look, amused and yet suddenly too shy to make a quip in return.  She sat at the edge of the bed, and Kíli smiled, pleased to have her within reach.  

They regarded each other for a moment, both uncertain, now it came to it, where to begin.  Then Kíli reached out to one of the braids that lay over her shoulder and, tugging the clasp free, started to pull the woven strands loose with his fingers.  

* * *

Sometimes it was better to have a heart that was broken rather than whole, Tauriel mused as she listened to Kili’s slow, even breathing as he slept beside her.  Some happiness was too great for a single heart to hold.  Better, then, to let your heart break, that your joy might spill out to fill the heart of another.  She looped an arm over him and settled her head against his shoulder, surrendering herself to a drowsy contentment that transformed itself, at last, to sleep.

* * *

 Kíli woke to the sight of sun-dappled leaves above his head.  Odd.  He didn’t think he’d gone to sleep outside.  No, there was the roof above him; the shaft of sunlight was slanting in from an opening at the far end of the room.  But that didn’t explain the leaves...

He sighed.  It didn’t matter, with the soft weight of Tauriel’s limbs tangled over him.  

Then he remembered where he was: in a tree, in the arms of an elf.  Of his wife.  She was fully and truly his now.  The bond, tenuous at first, which had grown between them since their first meeting two autumns ago was complete.  Surely it would continue to strengthen over the years, but he had given her all of himself that he could, and time would accomplish the rest.

He kissed her, and she stirred.  

“Kíli, my love,” she murmured sleepily and nestled closer to him.  He let her doze, content to admire the way the leaf-tossed shadows played over her skin.  At last she shifted again, and he knew she was awake from the way her eyelashes flicked against his shoulder.

“You forgot about the tree, didn’t you?” she asked.

Kíli made a puzzled sound.

“You woke me up at dawn to tell me it was raining.”  

“Oh.”  He remembered her kissing him back to sleep, but not much beyond that.

“I didn’t think you were listening when I told you it was just the wind in the leaves.”

Kíli gathered her into his arms.  

“The last time you held me like this, I was dying.  It’s much better this way,” he told her.

Tauriel sighed.  “And you actually have a heartbeat this time.”  She raised her head from his chest and kissed him.  Her hair had fallen down over her face; Kíli caught it and tucked it back behind her ear.  

“I know you elves love words,” he said.  “You can fit the whole beauty of a thing into a song.  But we dwarves work in material things, in metal and stone.  A song would never be enough: a dwarf doesn’t know a thing’s full beauty till he’s held it in his hands.”  He drew his fingers down the curve of her neck till they caught on the gold chain of her necklace.  “You’re beyond beautiful, Tauriel.”

She closed her hand over his, and the emerald pendant of his betrothal gift was caught between their fingers.  “ _Meleth nîn_ , I am truly happy,” she said, and kissed him again, first his lips and then above his heart.  “It’s healed so well,” she mused, tracing a finger over the scar on his chest.  “I’d never have guessed how recent it is.  Or perhaps,” she added mischievously, “it’s just hidden under all this hair.”

“Hey!  I’ll have you know, my chest hair is the source of my natural dwarvish fortitude!”  

“Don’t worry, I—”  She looked up at him and flushed.  “I rather like it.”

“Really?”  He sounded genuinely surprised.  “Compared to your elf men, I must be a bear.”

Tauriel giggled.  “I’m sure you have the strength of one.  No elf could match you in that respect.”

Grinning, Kíli caught her and wrestled her to the bed beneath him, and neither of them said anything else sensible for the rest of the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The description of Elvish weddings in "Laws and Customs Among the Eldar" makes them sound uncomplicated with little ceremony. I love the idea that the pledge in Iluvatar's name is the central element.
> 
> Kili's joke about needing an elf for finding hidden doors is a (perhaps somewhat obscure) joke about D&D. In the early editions of the game, elves had the racial ability to find hidden doors simply by observing them (rather than explicitly searching). If your elf character walked past a hidden door, the DM would roll to determine if you noticed it. So, obviously, any dwarf technique for finding hidden doors would require an elf. ;)
> 
> I'm pretty sure that Kili would agree with Varric Tethras (my favorite character from one of my favorite games, Dragon Age II) that impressive chest hair counts more than a beard when it comes to being a dwarf.


	23. Chapter 23

Kíli and Tauriel remained in the Greenwood for a week following the wedding. Their families mostly left them to themselves, and they enjoyed seven days of lazy mornings, slow afternoons, and long nights. When they did finally leave for Erebor, their party traveled at a leisurely pace, and no-one complained if the two of them rode off at night to lie under the stars and only rejoined the rest later the next morning.

They arrived at the mountain several days before the second wedding was to take place. The preparations had already been made, and there was little to do in the mean time but rest from their travels.

The day after their arrival, Kíli had taken Tauriel down to his personal workshop. As he gathered tools, Tauriel remarked, "So there _is_ a reason we came down here. I thought it was just to get away from everyone."

"It is," he said, drawing her close for a kiss. "But while we're here, we might as well be useful. Did you bring what I asked?"

"'Gold I have worn before,'" she said, repeating his words, and handed him several beads which had once ornamented one of her dresses.

"Perfect." He took them from her and placed them in a crucible. "We need to inscribe our gold for the ceremony tomorrow."

Kíli took a flat piece of gold from his own pocket.

"What is that?" Tauriel asked.

"It's my birth gift." He placed it in her hand. "You don't think we could let something so important as a birth go unnoticed, did you?"

The gold pendant that filled Tauriel's palm was ornamented by an intricately carved version of Kíli's personal diamond motif.

"My dad made this for me. With a little help from Fíli," Kíli explained.

"It's wonderful," she breathed, tracing the design with her fingertips. "I can see this was lovingly done." She handed it back to him. "Are you sure you want to use it?"

"I won't hurt it," he assured her. He took a knife and deftly pared a shaving of gold from around the edge of the pendant; the design remained intact. "I could only give you the most precious gold I have."

"My little baubles seem hardly worthy of your gift," Tauriel confessed.

"Nonsense," Kíli told her. "You probably were wearing them before I was born, so they're more a part of you than any dwarf's gold ever has been."

Kíli placed the gold shavings from his pendant in a separate crucible and, as Tauriel watched, he heated the metal slightly and then pounded it into a small wafer, repeating the process for her own offering.

Then, taking a fine engraving tool, he quickly and easily cut something into the surface of his own gold. Leaning over his shoulder, Tauriel saw that he had inscribed Cirth runes that spelled his name: _Bakhâl_.

"This is the only time a dwarf ever writes his true name," Kíli explained. "The gold is for my body, and the name my soul. Tomorrow they'll be joined to yours by the smith who makes our rings, just as we have been joined at our Maker's hands."

"It's a beautiful symbol, Kíli."

"Here," he said, turning and pressing the graver into her hand. "You have to inscribe your own; I can't do it for you."

"I don't think mine will turn out quite as prettily as yours!" Tauriel protested.

Kíli laughed. "It's going to be melted down! All that matters is that it's written by your hand. Here, like this." He adjusted the graver in her fingers. "Remember, you are the wife of a dwarf."

The task proved rather easier than Tauriel had expected, as the lightly alloyed gold was still quite soft. She spelled her own private name, _Thalind_ , in runes that were only slightly uneven.

"Lovely," Kíli pronounced when she had finished.

Tauriel giggled as she compared her effort to his. "Tell me, master dwarf, do I have any potential?"

"Lots," he told her proudly. "Besides, nobody can expect perfection the first time."

Laughing, Tauriel sank down on the edge of the work table and tugged him towards her.

"I will miss you tonight," she said. It had seemed fitting for her to keep her old, private rooms for these few nights before the second wedding.

He leaned against the edge of the table between her knees and looped his arms around her waist. "So will I. My new bed is far too big for just one dwarf."

"I promise I will help with that," she teased, and leaned into his kiss.

When he let her go, Kíli regarded her with an amused expression.

"What?" Tauriel prompted.

"Well, you look like a proper dwarf of the forge now. Though, uh, I think it's clear you weren't exactly getting any work done."

Tauriel followed his glance to see the soot streaked from her collarbone to her neckline.

"Sorry," he snickered. "Here, you have some on your face, too." He rubbed at her cheek with his cuff.

"Kíli!" she scolded. "I should have thought a dwarf would pride himself in keeping a tidy forge!"

"Well, yes," he admitted, wiping his hands against his tunic before slipping them beneath her hair. "But I had other things on my mind when I was here last."

Tauriel laughed against his ear. "As you do now?"

For answer, he kissed her again.

* * *

The next morning, Frey helped Tauriel prepare her clothing and hair for the wedding. Tauriel could not help noticing that the young dwarf seemed as pleased as she was herself.

"We don't get to celebrate many weddings," Frey explained as she pinned up a handful of braids. "You should wear this one, don't you think?" she added, indicating a decorative hair clasp.

Tauriel nodded and handed the clasp to the dwarf girl. "Would you ever consider marrying?" She knew not all dwarf women did choose a spouse.

"If the right man asked," Frey returned with a pleased grin.

"Meaning, you already know who he is," Tauriel guessed.

"Perhaps!"

Tauriel's dwarven dress had far more layers than her elvish wedding gown, and Tauriel was glad to have Frey help her sort out all the lacing and clasps. The outer layer of bodice and skirt was heavy with silver and gems.

"If I weren't marrying a king, I should feel quite overdressed," Tauriel admitted, fingering the tiny silver scales that framed her neckline. "I don't think I've been so well-armored before, even for battle. This corset alone could constitute a breastplate."

Frey giggled. "Lace and flower petals are quite fitting attire for an elven bride, but a dwarf's gown shows she is truly her husband's treasure."

Tauriel nodded. "Of course! I only hope I do not trip on my hem, for I shall never be able to get back up!"

* * *

Kíli and a small troop of his kinsmen—dressed in ceremonial armor and carrying weapons—were waiting outside Tauriel's private rooms to escort her and her family to the hall where the ceremony would be performed.

Kíli's expression brightened as he caught sight of her. "You know," he said as he took her arm, "You make a very lovely dwarf lass."

"That may be the finest compliment this elf has ever received," she returned fondly.

Though the ceremony itself was a private affair, many people had turned out to watch the marriage procession through the wide public halls. Tauriel keenly felt their eyes on her, and she prayed she looked a fitting match for their king. Surely they would see that her unfamiliar dwarvish clothing proved her acceptance and devotion to her husband's people, rather than thinking it simply revealed her strangeness more clearly.

Kíli's mother and more of his kinsmen and friends awaited the wedding party within a hall of his royal apartments, and Tauriel forgot her nervousness as they all warmly greeted her.

According to tradition, Kíli's friends were all assembled, not merely to witness the ceremony, but to welcome the bride into her husband's household. As soon as the wedding party had entered, they had been presented with goblets of ale (or wine) as the first sign of hospitality. While the guests mingled and warmed to each other, Kíli led Tauriel to a table at the side of the room, where the elaborately illuminated marriage contract had been set out beside pens and ink. Tauriel had found the idea of a legal marriage contract both foreign and perplexing, and Kíli had been careful to explain that its authority lay more in symbolism than in legal fact: the legal union of the bride and groom's property served as a tangible sign of their spiritual union. For just as their wealth was now shared, so, too, was their happiness.

After Tauriel and Kíli had signed, their witnesses had done so as well—Dwalin and Daín for the groom and Silwen and Tauriel's grandmother for the bride. Then everyone had gathered round the couple as the two had approached the head of the hall, where a ceremonial foundry had been set up. Kíli had chosen Gloín to cast their rings, as much for his skill in gold as for his authority as one of Kíli's few kinsmen who was himself married.

When they stood before him, Gloín had asked them, in Khuzdul, to declare their purpose.

In the same tongue, Kíli had responded, _"We ask you to craft the rings that symbolize our union, just as our Maker has crafted us for one another as husband and wife."_

Gloín nodded. _"I will undertake that honor."_ He held forth a crucible.

Kíli produced the wafer of gold he had inscribed with his name and held it over the crucible, saying, _"With this gold I give myself to be joined to Thalind as husband."_ Then he dropped the gold.

Following his example, Tauriel presented her own gold, and swore, _"With this gold I give myself to be joined to Bakhâl as wife."_

Gloín turned back to the small furnace and melted their offerings of elvish and dwarvish gold into a single mass. He then poured it into molds for the rings. Tauriel watched, curious, as Gloin then plunged the mold into water and produced, a few moments later, the two bands of gold, still joined by the thread of metal where the molten gold had flowed into the mold. As Gloin trimmed the sprues and filed the bands smooth, Kíli caught Tauriel's hand.

He said softly, "We've been bound by so many ties, our love will never come undone."

Tauriel leaned down so her forehead rested against his. "Not beyond the ending of the world," she answered and kissed him.

Without taking her hand from his, she removed her silver betrothal band. "Keep this as my first promise fulfilled." She pressed the ring into his hand.

Kíli tucked it safely away into a pocket; then he took off his own betrothal ring and returned it to her.

When they looked back to Gloín, he presented them their newly made rings.

_"By the Maker's authority, I name you husband and wife,"_ he said.

Kíli smiled broadly has he claimed Tauriel's ring and placed it on her hand. Her eyes blurred with tears then, but she gave him his ring just as easily by touch.

* * *

Before they arrived at the feast, Kíli and Tauriel had stopped back at his chambers to exchanged his armor for more comfortable attire.

His was the same room in which Tauriel found him after the battle two years ago. Some of the furnishings had been changed, including the bed, which was a good deal larger than the one she remembered him lying in as he healed.

"You're right; this is enormous," she said, laughing, as she flopped down at the foot of the bed. "Were your dwarvish carpenters under the impression that I am a giantess?"

She lay back on the mattress and stretched out her arms, which did not reach the edges.

"Well, I _was_ hoping someday there wouldn't be just the _two_ of us," he explained, throwing himself down beside her. "Ouch. Don't let me do that again in plate armor."

Tauriel sat up and leaned over him. "A most prudent thought," she pronounced.

Kíli's expression went serious for a moment. "Do you think we'll be able to...?"

She smiled. "We are enough alike to love one another. Surely we are no more different in body than we are in soul."

"I hope you're right," he said, and his grin returned once more, he caught her about the neck and pulled her down against him.

"Plate armor!" she gasped weakly, the breath knocked from her lungs.

"Right! Sorry."

Tauriel giggled as the gems and silver on her dress clattered over the surface of his breastplate. "This dress! I feel like I'm as armored as you!"

"Well, you look very nice in it," he said thoughtfully.

"Kíli! If you are thinking I will look nicer out of it, you are going to have to wait, as I have no idea how it goes back on," she scolded, amused.

"Ah, well, I tried," he teased. "Here, at least help me out of this armor before I suffocate."

"I hardly think you will suffocate; I know dwarvish armor is designed too well for that," Tauriel corrected, though she did as he asked, and they returned, without too much further delay, to the festivities.

* * *

The feast, which had commenced with the ceremonial opening of the first cask of wedding ale—a soft, golden unfiltered wheat beer—had lingered all afternoon long. The celebration had been extended to all the dwarves of Erebor, not simply Kíli's kin, and the new couple had received the congratulations of many, many whom Tauriel already knew and more whom she did not. Though some of the dwarves still seemed to regard her with cool curiosity, she took heart in the fact that all who addressed them had a genuine interest, if not fondness, for their king. If they cared for him, she thought, they would soon come to see that she did, as well.

Everyone, it was clear, had a very enjoyable evening. There were no major cultural misunderstandings between her family and Kíli's. Silwen won a drinking match with Thorin, who had to be carefully left to doze at the side of the room. Her own grandmother and Dís seemed to have found some point of understanding and were become quite pleased with one another. And Frey, to Tauriel's amusement, seemed to be found near Ori most of the night.

Tauriel and Kíli, however, were happiest of all when, after the mead had been passed round with dessert, Dwalin suggested that no-one would likely miss them if they left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Given Bilbo's very involved contract in the movies, I supposed the dwarves would likely use equally elaborate wedding contracts. Because dwarves are steadfast in their devotion, I doubt a contract is needed to shore up a marriage relationship, but I can see dwarves using a contract for formality's sake. I like the idea that wealth and treasure is a central metaphor in a dwarvish wedding, and I think the contract goes along with that concept.
> 
> A complete PDF version of Bilbo's contract can be found online [here](http://hole-intheground.blogspot.com/2013/02/bilbos-contract-full-text-pdf.html), and it is hilarious. I earned some very odd looks for myself by giggling over the contract for a solid twenty minutes in the computer lab once.


	24. Chapter 24

Everything in her life felt in the right place, Tauriel realized, for the first time since, well, since before she had even met Kíli. Those last few decades before Thorin and Company had arrived, she had been growing vaguely and yet insistently more dissatisfied with her isolation in the Greenwood. She had needed to find there was more she could know and do in the world, though what precisely she had wanted, she could hardly guess.

If anyone had told her then she would become a queen—and a dwarf queen, at that—she would have laughed and accused him of drinking too deeply from the King's private vintage. Some days, she still had to remind herself it was true as she wove her hair through the circlet of silver and moonstones. Would she ever truly feel like a queen?

Tauriel needed no reminding that she belonged to Kíli, however. She seemed to feel him in her soul, as tangibly as the pendant of emerald and gold that lay against her heart.

She was deeply proud of him for the confidence he had gained even in the few years since his coronation. While he still relied on the counsel of those older and more experienced than he, there was an assurance and confidence to his decisions, even to his bearing, that he had not had before. He was a young king still, but very much a king indeed.

Tauriel found it something of a struggle to fulfill the role of queen, at first. It was not that people did not respect her; no, they gave her all the courtesy and regard she could have asked. But everyone seemed to overlook her as an aid to her husband simply because she was no dwarf. True, she might know little about mining or metalwork, guild management or trading contracts, but how was she to learn if no-one thought her capable of such matters?

One lord had refused to leave construction plans with her or another had said she'd hardly understand the niceties of the latest mining report that she had offered to help prepare. After Kíli had spent several weeks patiently listening to her complaints, he had dressed her in a work smock and taken her down into forge and mine with him.

Tauriel had secretly enjoyed the surprise she had elicited, first by her presence and then by her quick comprehension. While she would never have a dwarf's nearly instinctive understanding of metal and stone, she soon learned enough to be a help to Kíli in administrating his many tasks. Indeed, her subjects—yes, they were hers too, she realized—clearly respected her more for having been willing to dirty her hands and learn true dwarven work.

She still labored over regrowing the forest on the mountainsides, which were already showing swift and steady growth a mere handful of springs after Erebor had been reclaimed. Dís had been a ready companion at the task. For the older dwarf woman, the forest seemed a symbol of days of youth and cheer which might be reborn.

Relations between Erebor and the Greenwood continued to mend. Still in the early years of Kíli's reign, Tauriel had helped reestablish the old trade agreements, and dwarvish work soon flowed into and through the Greenwood and west of the Misty Mountains. Tauriel was personally very grateful for the alliance, since it meant she and Kíli might spend a few weeks each summer, when they were free, in her own home. She cherished such holidays as a kind of yearly honeymoon, when she could forget she was a queen and Kíli a king, and they could be simply two young people in love.

They were both, she knew, still so very young. Kíli had accepted his throne long before most dwarves even married. While elves, of course, did not have the same kinds of set ages for things, she supposed Thranduil must secretly laugh at her for becoming a royal consort at her age. Yet she wouldn't have changed their lives if she could have. Little about their story together seemed to fit precedent and convention, and yet it had been no less good for all that. Besides, she knew that she did not have the luxury of drawing out their lives, as she might have done, had she chosen an elf. And so, she was content to let events choose their own timing.

She had known, since she married him, that Kíli very much wanted to be a father. And yet, as two decades passed and they remained childless, Tauriel knew Kíli worried that what they both desired might indeed prove impossible. A dwarven couple would have produced a child by now. Tauriel was less troubled; elvish births were more rare yet, and seemed ruled by far less precise principles than those of men or even dwarves.

"I've been wondering..." Kíli had begun one night as they lay still, waiting for sleep. "I don't know anything about this kind of thing, but... when elves beget children—I mean—we're not doing anything wrong, are we? Are we supposed to do something special like, I don't know, come together under a full moon or something?"

Tauriel laughed. "The moon was merely at a quarter three nights ago."

"Oh." Kíli didn't know how she knew things like that, under the mountain where the sky was hidden, though it did not surprise him that she did. "Wait— Are you saying you're...?"

"...with child," she supplied for him. "Yes." She shifted in bed and put her arm around him.

"But... In three days...how could you possibly know? Is it an elvish thing?" Kíli mused as she nestled her head beneath his chin.

She smiled against his nightshirt; he was always ready to attribute anything unexpected and surprising about her to the fact that she was an elf, though this time she supposed he was right. "It must be," she said. "But I'm sure about our son."

"Son?"

"Well, that part _is_ just a guess."

Kíli laughed then. "You're wonderful, _meleth nîn._ " He had adopted her elvish endearments, just as she had learned to be his dwarvish queen.

They said nothing for a while, finding it easier to express their happiness without words.

"Do you realize," Kíli said after Tauriel was sure he had fallen asleep, "that you carry the rarest creature in all of Arda? Both Elda and Khazad: the world has never seen anyone like him before. Or her. I would be perfectly happy with a daughter."

Tauriel laughed softly and traced the familiar shape of his smile with a fingertip; by now, she knew every line of him, even in the dark. "I want you to be perfectly happy," she said. "So if our first is a son, our second will have to be a daughter."

"I have the most ingenious, intelligent, and beautiful wife in all of Arda," Kíli pronounced fondly. "So tell me, if you knew three days ago, why did you wait to tell me?"

"Because..." She shifted so he could draw her to him, her back to his chest. "Because it was the most beautiful secret I've ever had."

"I can hardly begrudge you that." He kissed the base of her neck, and shortly afterwards he truly did fall asleep.

* * *

Tauriel had been nervous to announce the news publicly; though she had won the approval of many who had doubted her, she knew there were those who still would have preferred her to be a dwarf, not for herself, but for the sake of Kíli's heirs. Yet to her surprise and relief, nearly everyone took the news as a sign of their king's good fortune and prosperity. Knowing that their people recognized her as a party to the wellbeing of king and kingdom, Tauriel felt she belonged as queen more truly than she ever had before.

Her pregnancy had passed untroubled, a fact which had relieved both herself and Kíli, neither of whom had truly known exactly what to expect; births were infrequent for both of their peoples. There had been some brief concern and confusion when Tauriel had carried the child past the usual ten months, but as soon as she had understood the reason for her husband's and his family's distress, she had explained that twelve was normal for elvish births.

And so, in the spring, twenty-one years since they had wed and twenty-three since Kíli had become king, their son was born.

"I thought we could name him Fíli, if you liked," Tauriel told Kíli as he admired the squalling bundle Dís had placed in his arms; no one had been able to send him away and he had been at his wife's side throughout the birth.

"Yes: Fíli," he repeated and kissed the babe before transferring him to his mother's eager arms.

"He's beautiful," she sighed.

"Because he looks like you. See!" Kíli gently brushed aside little Fíli's already full ginger hair to reveal a slightly crumpled but distinctly pointed ear.

* * *

Fíli's birth had not been the only cause for celebration that year. Ori, after some years of patient encouragement, had courted Frey, and the two of them were married that same summer. Tauriel had grown quite close to the young dwarf woman, and she had been delighted to see Frey find the same happiness that she herself enjoyed with Kíli. Frey, in turn, had almost immediately fallen in love with little Fíli and declared she was glad her future children would have companions their own age.

Indeed, Fíli was not long the only child in Erebor; within five years (and true to his mother's promise) he gained a sister, Iúleth. She took after her father in coloring, with his dark hair and eye, but with her mother's slender build. Frey had a son, Thraín, not long after that, and true to her prediction, the three youngsters became nearly inseparable companions.

Those first few decades after the birth of her children were the happiest Tauriel had ever known. Kíli was truly grown into his role as king, and now, as the mother of his heirs, she, too, felt fully his queen. It no longer mattered that she be able to match Kíli—or any other dwarf, for that matter—in the management of Erebor. She still learned as she watched and supported him, of course. But now Fíli and Iúleth were her especial charge, and in loving them, her private duty to her husband and family became also a service to her kingdom. Hers was a place no-one else could fill. She thought the other dwarves sensed her self-assurance, and their confidence and respect for her grew in turn.  
Sometimes Tauriel wondered how long such peace and tranquility could last: there came hints of unrest in the southeast, from a place known as the Dark Lands. Even her home forest had not been completely cleansed, and Dol Guldur remained a troubled place which might easily prove a danger once again as the years passed. Yet Erebor's connections to Dale and the Greenwood had grown strong, and Tauriel took respite in the thought that, if war ever did break out again, it would find the free people of Wilderland united rather than divided.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pardon me for covering a lot of ground quickly in this chapter! I had ideas for events during the War of the Ring, and wanted to focus on that, rather than try to draw out what is essentially a happy interim for everyone. 
> 
> That having been said, I'm afraid this story will have to pause here indefinitely, for two reasons. Firstly, this was my first extended fanfic attempt, and while it was great fun and I'm pretty happy with it, I didn't leave myself very far to go in terms of conflict. And secondly, this semester of grad school is just a doozy, and while I'm still making a priority to write for fun, it's hard to keep up two separate fics. I am focusing on _So Comes Snow After Fire,_ which I'm ridiculously pleased with, to be honest. I started it after I'd been writing this fic for months, and I think the writing practice shows in that my second one is a more mature story, truth be told. So, I encourage you to check out _So Comes Snow_ if you haven't yet; I'm still working hard on that one! (And I expect to have the next chapter for it up soon!) As always, thanks so much for your readership and support!


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